Spent most of it reading a friend’s book-to-be, which is AWESOME. Reading awesome books always make me want to burn all my writing and write more. Better. Faster. Yes, both at once.

(This might be the post-NaNo blues ten days early. Writing like a maniac has it’s drawbacks.)

Was invited to join a book club by a friend. I am so not a book club type person, but I was promised it would be non-pretentious and come with tea, baked goods and awesome people. Okay, so I wasn’t promised the last part, but I trust my dear friend in this aspect. And I shall read the books in English and thoroughly confuse everyone.

I feel like I’m the only person in this world without kids-house-job-partner. I don’t even know if I want any of the above, yet it brings me down. Possibly because of the light in my parents’ eyes when they see my pregnant cousin and her toddler.

On the upside, for the first time since I broke up with A. I feel the want and need for Christmas decorations. Our relationship dissolved around the holidays, and so I haven’t even bought a Christmas tree or any decorations whatsoever since I returned to Sweden. I should have some in storage, from before I moved abroad, but I have no idea where to look for them. I think I’m going to start over. I’m a big fan of starting over.

Broke another pair of head phones.

Dyed my hair. Cut my hair. (Well, not personally, it wouldn’t look this good if I’d hacked away at it.)

Game starting right now, and hopefully it will go well and give me my “I” and “my”, etc,’s back. Apparently I lose them when I don’t feel well. Possibly I’m the last one to notice.

Wow. So. I’ve never written this much this fast before. Last year I finished on the… 27th or 28th, and in 2006 I finished at like four in the morning of the 30th. Either I’m high on B12 (it’s a yummy, yummy thing that I can’t believe I went without for so long without noticing) or NaNo is actually inducing some sort of hypomanic episode. Not sure which, but let’s pretend it’s the former, yes?

I crossed 50k earlier today, and just now I wrote the very last word. I ended up at 57,033, of which 3k was written before NaNo started. And just because I am still in the honeymoon phase of my novel (the easiest one I’ve ever written, by far, unless we count the blueberry soccer novel I wrote together with TansyRR and for that one she wrote half!), I’m going to share a tiny bit:

“Please. We had a fight and I just want to make it up to him but I don’t know the city and I have no idea where to start looking for him.” I was gearing up to show her some real tears – being a drama queen is really convenient sometimes – and McKinnon, bless his soul, patted me on the arm, playing along.
“Erm, well…”
“We’re not serial killers,” McKinnon confirmed. “In fact, if it makes you feel better I can leave my ID with you. So if he turns up dead you know who did it and all.”
“Wow,” I said. “Thanks a lot, McKinnon.”
“You’re welcome.” He patted me even more lovingly on the arm. I took the urge to beat him for it out back and shot it in the back of the head.

Tragically these two only spend about three chapters of the book in the same room. Ah, well. Short and sweet is the word. And tomorrow I promise you all a post about something other than NaNo. Really. It’s just far too late for that sort of crazy shenanigans today. But tomorrow I shall review three books and man, I am looking forward to that!

PS. After this month my writing tag is as big as my depression tag! Wheeee!

I’m at the part of the book that feels like running downhill really fast, which feels like a bit early. Can I keep that up for another 15,000 words? Not sure. What I do know is that I’ve only done about half my plots yet, so maybe I need to re-think. Later. When it’s not November.

And for something else entirely… It’s a million years since I did one of these, so I thought I should give it a go.

When I was about ten my grandparents lived in this house out in the middle of nowhere that my grandfather built without help of any contractors. It was big and it was build to incorporate the small, two room cottage that my grandmother grew up, which became the living room and a bit. Upstairs grandmother had a weaving room, and grandfather had his office. It was this mystical room with creaking floorboards, an enormous desk, lots of little trinkets on shelves and most importantly, a typewriter. It was an electric one, a fancy thing that I could spend hours just writing my name on because I loved the sound.

When they grown-ups got tired of me spending all my time visiting in this room they dug an old, manual typewriter out of storage somewhere and let me take it home. It looked something like this, but was green. It had ribbons that were half black, half red, and you had to use all your strength to push each key down or it wouldn’t leave a mark. And if you didn’t land your finger directly on the right key it HURT.

I spent so much time writing on it that it’s amazing my parents didn’t murder me in my sleep. Seriously, the sound of a manual typewriter is loud, monotonous and it never ended. Ever.

Of course, because it took so much strength to write just the simplest sentence, I still covetted a typewriter just like my grandfather’s. An electric. It was like, the fanciest thing you could imagine, back then. I read the books about Mimmi by Viveca Sundvall and was jealous of her typewriter, because even though it was pink and lacked the Z-key it was electric and thus awesome.

I started to save up for a nice one. When I had about 500 SEK (which took forever, my weekly allowance was like 20 SEK) my grandparents took pity on me and gave me the other 500 needed to buy one. And so I had A REAL TYPEWRITER. My poor, old-fashioned, much more aestethically pleasing manual typewriter was put back up in the attic, and I wrote up a storm. Because somewhere in betweeen the two I had started writing stories. Mostly I wrote about girls with long, long names Jessamyn “Jess” Martinsson was a favourite, thanks to Sweet Valley High past generation book, the title which I have repressed) so that I could shorten them and therefore get to use the “-sign, which was my favourite key.

And then I started junior high (ish, age 14-16, what oh what should I call that?) and we had old, old, old school Macintosh computers, which were then embarrassingly out of date (about ten years old). I think it was the 128k, but I’m not entirely sure.

And that, my friends, was when I first discovered the joy of using italics in my writing.

I attribute at least half my word count to the sudden appearance of people that I had no idea existed three days ago. Say hello to Catriona, who hides a lot, and Angus who is a royal pain in the arse. They’re certainly making life interesting, I have to say.

Enough about NaNo, let’s speak about… writing. Er. Yes. That is possibly also NaNo-related. Sorry about that.

I’ve been enjoying reading all the writing tips from various published writers. Scott Westerfeld is the one who is writing the most useful ones, as far as I’m concerned. And some day I will actually read one of his books. Seriously. I will. I especially like his post on meta docs, which TansyRR elaborated on here. I’m not entirely sure that my meta docs are as interesting, since I have yet to get something published, but I figured that I needed to write something about ZuluPad, which is, seriously, the best thing ever, and I don’t know what I did before I found out about it.

Anyone who knows me also knows that I am a total slut for writing software. I was extremely sad when I realised that Scrivener is nothing but a wet dream for me, as I don’t own a Mac and is unlikely to be able to afford it in the next decade or, you know, fourteen. I’ve tried a few others since, and I think the one I like the best is Rough Draft. yWriter is excellent too, if you are the sort of writer who writes lots of small scenes and puzzle them together into a book. I’m not, everything that happens do so because of what happened before, and I am too much of a control freak to use the square brackets that Justine Larbalestier writes about here. I’d much rather write a very rough outline of each scene as I go along, and go back and add more later. This constant ret-conning means that it’s not really a good idea for me to split it up, like I did when I used yWriter.

But Rough Draft! Oh. It’s lovely. It’s actually just a tweak of a .rtf-based word processor, but it does employ lists, which I love. Any old word processors have a search and replace function, right? But Rough Draft lists them for you, so you can see for yourself just how often you use a word. Or, which I do far more often, do a search when you need to scroll back for the deatails on somebody’s hair or injury or, you know, what exactly that dirty old curry place was called again.

I made a screen cap for your pleasure, where you can see that I have used the word “because” 128 times in 20,000 words. It also has a “prose mode”, which automatically puts a tab in for you at the start of each sentence, it has very handy “insert” and “notes” function on the side, and my favourite thing about it — it lets you put tabs of several docs side by side. Which is useful if you, like me, write as much for your leftovers doc, which is bits and pieces to use later, as you do in the main doc. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it does not use pages. That is, it all looks like one loooooong piece of texts. No new pages for new chapters. It’s kind of annoying, but I can live with it.

And for a post in which I meant to write about the awesome that is ZuluPad, I have written a lot without mentioning, don’t you think? You can download it here, if you want. But for you to want it I need to talk about it, don’t I?

Basically, it’s like your own little Wikipedia. You can put in whatever you like, highlight a word and then click “link”, and a separate page will be created. And there you can type in OTHER STUFF, and maybe something in there requires a link. And so on.

Because I like to have things sorted in a very certain manner my main page looks like this. It’s a bit redundant, since you can find each of these links in the drop down menu, but this way I can sort them by topic rather than alphabetically, which makes me feel like I know what I’m doing. Most of the time.

Of course, since this is straight up YA, and not fantasy or any type of alternate universe (even if the place-called-Kirk doesn’t exist in the real world), this list is kind of short. Because I’m not making up terms, crazy abilities and other fun stuff.

And just to show you how it looks when I click on one of the links, I also made a cap of this. Here’s the names of everyone in the book, or rather, the ones that fit in this little screen cap. I sadly had to leave out the old woman that is identified as “is a total gossip, but she always gives us money for Christmas, so I’ve always liked her okay”.

This is mostly so I don’t use the same name twice (it has happened!), and also, so I don’t OD on names starting with Mc. Which I kind of have already, haven’t I? I blame it on the original story taking place in Scotland, but I realised that if I know very little about British culture, I know even less about Scottish. So I changed location.

And yes, I do have a page titled “things to ask Jenn/Val”, because they are my resident Brit and Scot, respectively. Everyone needs at least one of each. I also have a couple of Aussies and Americans. What can I say? I’m a lucky girl.

…

And, in case you were wondering, yes, these mood swings are just as exhausting to me as they are to you. Yesterday was awful, awful no good day, and today? Today is pretty awesome. Though I think I’m about to crash in a heap. Yesterday I tried not to nap, which is what normally makes my day manageable, just so I would sleep at night, totally forgetting the essential thing. Namely, just because I don’t sleep during the day doesn’t mean I do sleep at night. Even if I take insane amounts of antidepressants that are SUPPOSED to knock me out. They don’t. Not anymore. But damn, I wrote a good chapter of book in my head while I was tossing and turning.

Maybe tomorrow I will write about the importance of having a good playlist when you are writing. And what’s in it. All that.

I have never written this fast on my own before. It’s surreal. And when I say “on my own” I mean that the only way I’ve managed this much before is by having the prompt of having a co-writer, always giving me a paragraph to go on, reactions, narration, all that stuff.

This project is half easy as pie, half tricky and complicated. Because while I can spout off 2,000 words of Polly narration in an hour or two, writing her twin brother is SO MUCH HARDER. Although, I have to say that I am extremely amused that he turned out to realise that he was gay about ten chapters too early. Anyone who knows me knows that half my characters turn gay, or, you know, straight when they’re supposed to not be, and so on. I don’t think I’ve written a story in my life which was entirely heteronormative. Which is a pretty awesome quirk to have, I must say.

So, since my boy, turned gay so early I was directed towards Glee and the awesome gay kid in it. People have told me from the start that I would love this show. And I become anti, and I don’t watch it because everyone tells me I have to and in the end I LOVELOVELOVE it about a million years after everyone else.

So, yeah, here I am. You were right, damn it. All of you.

I have to say, though, that as much as I love Awesome Gay Kid, Evil Coach and all the others… I love Mercedes the most. She’s not only gorgeous, but curvy and fun and just… plain amazing. I keep replaying her numbers, just because she looks so amazing wearing real clothes, as opposed what you normal do with people of size on TV.

Sadly I can’t find a decent version of her song Bust Your Windows on YouTube. This one is the best I can find, which is like, really bad audio because I think the person is actually, um, FILMING THEIR COMPUTER or something.

Damn it. I wasn’t supposed to write about this today! Ack, poor Dairy Queen waiting to get reviewed.

I have finally found a word meter that I actually like, so hopefully I’ll be able to stop editing my old posts to make them all look the same already. I think. Half the fun with NaNo is all the shiny graphs and software and spreadsheets and all that you can play with. Which is not to say that I can’t do it for the rest of the year, because I always do that, I am a total slut for good (or fun, or only vaguely helpful) software. The difference is that this time of the year I get to post it to my blog. I think if I did this all the time somebody would end up shooting me in my sleep just to get me to shut my mouth.

So, um, I did it again. I wrote 2,800 words in one sitting again (and then another 800 words this afternoon), which makes my brain slightly ouchy. For some people this up-and-down is normal, I’m sure, but for somebody like me, who is an editing sort of writer, it’s kind of painful. Because, okay. A lot of people write about just WRITING and not caring if it’s crap. I have a hard time writing that way, and spend a good portion of last November changing my project from present to past tense. Which is so not what you’re supposed to do, but it works for me.

So, I thought I’d write a bit about the editing-writer. I’m sure there’s a lot of us out there, really.

With that said, the reason I never finished a book before I was 29 years old (the one I wrote in high school that was such a mess and unedited and awful that I’m ashamed I let anyone look at it, seriously, doesn’t count) is that I keep getting stuck after two or three chapters. Because every time I opened the doc, I would start reading from the beginning and get lost in the copy editing process, which is, you know, arguing with yourself if there really needs to be a comma there and if you shouldn’t change a word here and two words there.

This, I’m sure, was not helped by the fact that my Swedish teacher in high school was all about the grammar. Each sentence had to hold one main clause (huvudsats) and one sub-clause (bisats), and that was it. No stacking of sub-clauses, which is my favourite way to show that my character is kind of frantic, which they are a lot. No partial sentences, no, not even for emphasis. And if we dared to start a sentence with an “and” or an “of” or an “just”? BIG RED PEN CAME OUT.

And sure, grammar has its place. It really does. But it’s really hard to hold on to that you are a decent writer when every piece of prose (and they were very, very rare, we spent most of our time analysing Homer and Shakespeare and those guys, yes, in Swedish, so it was the translated works and don’t even get me started on that), comes back to you with a G (which is our equivalent of a B-/C+, or so) and a ton of criticism on the grammar, without saying a word about the actual contents.

(Then again, I am the person who dropped out of college level creative writing because I couldn’t take the criticism, so maybe my style is just… not the kind that makes teachers happy.)

I am getting off topic again, aren’t I? Sorry about that.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that being an editing sort of writer is okay if you set limits. Mine is that I cannot read back and edit more than one chapter whenever I sit down at the computer. That means that I writewritewrite, step away from the computer and do something else for a bit, and usually this is when the ideas come to me. So, when I open my doc the next time I read over the last chapter, add in what’s usually some more dialogue, a bit more description and narration and I swear that my writing would be so much worse if I didn’t let myself go back that last chapter.

Because I’m a bit of a neat freak and if I don’t go back those last two thousand words, I can’t think about anything but the way that comma really bothered me, and maybe the dialogue looks weird and I shouldn’t be writing anyway, I’m so very bad at it and this should all be burned. So, what other writers would consider a waste of time, because in all truth this means that the first hour of any writing session is spent editing, is actually essential to my sanity.

And that’s okay. Really. As long as you find that happy medium and stick to it.

Tomorrow I may write about the playlist I have currently, or maybe about my very first typewriter, because I loved it so and have an icon that goes so well with it, or about this amazing book I just read, Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. We shall see. Happy writing!

Nobody I know changes blogs as frequently as I do. Each time I say that this is the one. Really. For the last time. But this time I really mean it! Haha. Well, I do. I have my own domain for my craft blog, which is here, and every time I updated it I thought it was so awesome, and got sad that I didn’t have one for my real blog, that I updated lots more. So, here it is. Another one.

It’s Jumbled Words and not Jumbled Writings because the former was taken when I first signed up with Wordpress, and I had to re-think it all. So, Jumbled Words it is. Really.

I’m still in the honeymoon phase of my novel and find it cute and funny and quirky in all the right ways. Soon enough we’ll be slamming doors and annoy each other to pieces, I’m sure of it. But I’ll take it. Any writer knows to appreciate the very fleeting moments when you get to gaze into the (surprisingly distinct, seeing as it is an inanimate object) eyes of your new project, and so I am. Joyfully.

Am too tired to write anything of value, so I’m just going to throw my word meter on you and run like hell. Sorry about that.

As you can see today’s progress was a lot less. I only barely made 700 words, but thanks to my lovely words from yesterday I can go to bed still being on plus. That makes me very happy.

If you write the same amount every day you need to write 1,667 words to hit 50,000 by November 30th. I always go out hard, because I need a buffer, but I have never in my life written nearly 4k in one day before. And really? It is not a good idea. It’s a very, very, VERY bad idea. It is totally possible to write that much in 24 hours, but it’s going to hurt afterwards. Trust me on this one.

So, I’ve spent today mostly staring into space. I did go weaving for a few hours, which was nice and gave me a nice break from the computer. Which is, as you can imagine, crucial. Thing is, when you walk away from the computer you tend to end up re-writing scenes in your head, and then when you return you have to read over your last chapter and add in the changes you have only done in your head. They were for the good of the script, but ended up costing me about 300 words, that I am saving for later.

(Does every writer have a doc called “leftovers”? Because I do.)

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There have been some really excellent posts on NaNoWriMo on different blogs today, and because my brain is still broken (ouch) I am copping out and linking to them here:

…

USEFUL NANO-LINKS OF THE MOTIVATIONAL VARIETY:

1) Scott Westerfeld writes about a very interesting technique, which is JUST writing dialogue at first, and then go from there. I’ve never done this, although I am known to just add basic narration and then go back and add details later, and found it very interesting.

2) Justine Larbalestier writes about the importance of throwing caution to the wind and just WRITE. About calling it draft zero if you want, because seriously, there will be (probably) a million drafts before it’s ready for the eyes of a publisher anyway. The important thing, she writes, is that you write it, however bad it is, because if you never finish that first draft you can never work on the second or third or fourth or fifth. It makes me happy that she is a non-planner, just like me.

3) One of my favourite writerly blogs is written by Maureen Johnson. Today she wrote a brilliant post about the importance of the suck monster. I must quote:

There is no way of putting this delicately, so I am just going to shove it out there . . . if you are in high school or are otherwise just starting out, MUCH OF WHAT YOU WRITE IS GOING TO SUCK. This is because you learn to write while writing. So for a while, you have to embrace the Suckmonster. Hug it close to you. Love your Suckmonster, because your Suckmonster is going to help you get where you want to go.

4) TansyRR writes about the myths of NaNo, claiming that it is indeed possible to write something sustainable in just one month. Er. If you edit it to pieces once November is over. She very much emphasises exactly that, because without editing there will be no book! And she should know. Really.

5) Neil Gaiman wrote this brilliant pep talk two years ago. It still stands of course, because writing doesn’t really change all that much, which is to say that I recognise myself in it. Vividly.

…

1) USEFUL NANO-LINKS FOR ALL YOUR SOFTWARE/TECHNICAL NEEDS:

Six Word Meters and Trackers for the Word Count Obsessed, all which are brilliant, but I would recommend that you pick one that generates code rather than generating a picture, cos the latter tends to crash in the first week (then a good portion of NaNo-ers lose steam and only the really crazy ones keep going…).

2) NaNo Report Card for Google Docs. For those who aren’t intimidated by fancy graphs I recommend this. I don’t run Excel on my computer, and had trouble finding one in the right format, and was delighted to find a Google Docs converted version.

3) There are many different kinds of software to write in. My personal favourite is Rough Draft, but I also recommend yWriter, and there’s of course Scrivener (if you are un-broke and have a Mac), which makes my mouth water but I haven’t tried myself. Cos no Mac!

4) ZuluPad, a sort of Wiki for personal use, which I love so much that I want to marry it.