NickNoWriQuart - Failure Broadcast

After a few weeks of admin-linking to work elsewhere, a full on-this-website blog post this time - although not a super-long one as I'm going to talk about something I failed to achieve and I don't think dwelling on it for thousands of words is super healthy.

Between that paragraph and the title, regular readers may guess where I'm going - my one-thousand-words-a-day-for-three-months word count challenge did not reach its final goal. To be precise, it wound down a week or so back at around 66k, but due to real-life busywork, writing blogs for other sites and the huge amount of comic-based TV I'm trying to follow, I haven't got round to posting about it for a while.

Still, after going to the trouble of announcing the challenge was happening, I shouldn't gloss over my non-success. Pretty annoying that I chugged along fine for two months on my own and then died off just as everyone else joined in for NaNoWriMo, I must say.

Anyway. Where did it all go wrong?

Plan Vs Reality Vs Words Vs Plan

A lot of my problems can be summed up with this post I wrote in June, which is nice as it saves me typing all that out now. Turns out, planning a new novel in a whole new world is harder work than planning another nice comfy Hobson & Choi book.

My plan didn't entirely fall apart, which is nice - my words were going in the direction I planned, but the way they got there and the circumstances under which the story took place changed so much that I couldn't really keep going. Or rather, I could, but I'd be writing stuff I knew I'd end up deleting and much as I sometimes enjoy the NaNoWriMo forge-ahead-no-matter-what approach, I also don't like knowing beyond all doubt that I'm wasting my own time.

Plus, in terms of progress along my book plan, I'd written sixty-six thousand words to cover plot that should've taken about forty thousand max. So, even if I did my planned ninety-one thousand by the end of this month, I'd never have a full first draft as I barely covered half the story. Not to mention, I don't see much point in writing a new major part if I know huge chunks of the foundations will be removed, but haven't yet decided which ones.

So I've started bashing together a better, more coherent draft of the early chapters, re-using existing material for most of it, but stitched together differently. We'll see. As with all these word count challenges, best to focus on the fact I achieved something. Even if a huge chunk of my 66k gets cut, it all went toward figuring out the world.

...Vs Reality Vs Plans Vs Leeds...

Also unhelpful, I admit, that just as I started wobbling on how to progress the novel, I became incredibly busy all the time so momentum died. I was in the day job a lot, many birthday parties came along, I went to Leeds for Thought Bubble - which was fun, by the way. Saw loads of comics, feel like I want to write some more of them soon.

No idea how that fits in with the novel writing, no. Will try and keep bolting together my better draft.

To be honest, it is with some confusion that I stagger towards the end of 2016. At least I know to start editing H&C4 in early January, that's a pleasing constant. Everything else is in a state of weird flux.

And that's a current writing update, for anyone interested. If you're doing NaNoWriMo, good luck to you - you've just passed halfway, that's gotta feel good. And if you've attempted and failed NaNo, ah well. Stick with me and focus on the fact you wrote something. There could be gold in there somewhere.

Writing challenge update! Guest post! GollanczFest! ADMINARAMA!

This is going to be another post which mish-mashes together some smaller points rather than having an amazing structure of its own, I'm afraid, as I've been writing a lot of guest-posts for other people's blogs, so haven't got a huge amount of fuel left in the Blog-Engine (or spare time left in the day) to produce a properly-structured masterpiece for my own.

However, I want to do some kind of update on my ongoing thousand-words-a-day writing challenge and I've got a few other bits and bobs too, so here's another disjointed general summary!

NickNoWriQuart - OOH WE'RE HALFWAY THERE

The big news (for me anyway) is that I've made it over the halfway mark of the daily writing challenge I outlined on this blog a month ago. My day job got quite busy for a while and then I had to publish the third Hobson & Choi book and write all those guest posts and I really thought one of those things would smash it to bits, but no, I'm still on track. In fact, I'm a few days over quota, as I'm busy most of the weekend - for reasons I'll outline a little further down - and wanted to make sure I didn't drop the challenge.

So, the good news is that I've done nearly 50k and, if this were NaNoWriMo rather than NickNoWriQuart, would have won by now. But NickNoWriQuart is both more hardcore (longer total!) and less (smaller daily wordcount!) than NaNo.

The bad news is, as with nearly all my first drafts, decent-sized chunks of the plan haven't really survived contact with reality and various changes became necessary as I went along. This is something I've blogged about a fair bit - here I am talking about making less mistakes and here I am talking about plans going awry - and yet still it happens.

But I've got my notes, the broad plot remains in place, so I'm going to try and swoop onwards for now. Mostly because I think it would be useful to have taken a swing at the ending - more infuriating to go back now and make a huge amount of substantial change, then discover this new version doesn't work for my ending and have to change everything again.

So, in short, everything continues as normal. I still want a full first draft by the end of November (or possibly the end of the year if I need to write a final couple of chapters in Dec) and I'll do another update at some point.

Guest Post - Five High Street Institutions I Could Turn Evil in Future H&C Books

If you want something that more closely resembles a structured blog post, I've written this one for Jim over at YA Yeah Yeah in which I talk about five fixtures of the British high street that I could theoretically turn all crimey for a future Hobson & Choi novel.

Do give it a look for some fun. Even if you've no interest in hearing about my writing process (in which case the previous section of this post must've just killed you), this really is all silly jokes.

Oh, and as this is the only H&C-relevant section of this post - yes, the book 3 launch went fine, thanks for asking. Sold a decent amount of book three, gave away a huge amount of the newly-free-on-ebook book one. Coming up next: some promotion, including a few more guest posts (I'll try and list them here in some kind of link compilation) and maybe even some Multimedia Content. We'll see if that works out.

GollanczFest - Will it be GollanczBest?

This weekend, I am going to GollanczFest in London, in which a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy authors (who happen to all be published by Gollancz) will be talking in general about their work on Saturday and in a more advice-to-writers way on Sunday. I hope it'll be interesting, there are some great authors in attendance (including Joe Abercrombie, Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, loads of others) and after the excellent fun of Nine Worlds in August, I'm up for more of this kinda thing.

Linking back up to the first part, GollanczFest is why I've written a short way ahead on the NickNoWriQuart challenge. It may also be the topic of its own blog next week, if I can think of much to say beyond "Yeah, it was good." If you want that level of analysis, follow me on Twitter and it's a safe bet you'll get some over the weekend.

Okay, that turned out a decent length (if still quite bitty) post in the end. Cool cool.

NickNoWriQuart - One K, Once A Day

I stopped blogging regularly about my writing a while ago, felt I was running out of new/readable ways to say the same things - certainly, nothing I couldn't say on Twitter more concisely. However, I'm embarking on a Big Writing Exercise shortly, so I'm throwing it a post.

Because, yes, it's autumn, the end of the year is poking its head over the door, leaves are brown and it's cold in a Winter-Preview kinda way, all that can only mean one thing - Writers Doing Calendar-Based Word Count Challenges!

Obviously, I'm a little ahead of everyone else here - most are waiting for November to embark upon the epic NaNoWriMo quest. But I'm doing something a little different and I'll now attempt to explain it...