December First

Hey! :D 

So as the above buttons can inform you, both Ashmac and I made it to 50,000 words this month! 

This blog post is basically a really long update on some Nano stuff and plans for this following month. Even I think it's really long >___<

About NaNo:

The breakdown of my 50,027 words this month is somewhat like this: 

Where green is 1,667 or more words; yellow, orange and red indicate less progress than 1667, with red being atrociously few words. That long stretch of red can be explained by midterms falling on that week. The last few green spots had to make up for that, which explains why I'm rather behind, but not impossibly behind, in just about everything now. XD

At about 25K words I started getting really stuck and didn't like the redundancy in what I was writing. This led to some major revisions in the writing once I decided what to do. 

The original concept was based off of three settings: The elementary school, the university, and the Land of Dreams. I decided to cut out the part at the elementary school altogether even though original concept I had back in 4th/5th grade was situated in an elementary school and I had always envisioned the Campus Curse story as taking place in an elementary school. Like my college writing professor Collier Nogues suggested, "Sometimes a good idea doesn't make it into the actual essay" (heavily paraphrased). In regard to the rhetorical analysis I was writing, she said: "It's a good idea. And it's done what it could to get you started, but I think it's done what it can". She had a metaphor in there as well, but sadly I dont' remember it exactly. The point was, in order to go forward and write a better essay I would need to drop the original inspiration. Method acting isn't mentioned in my RA paper at all. I decided the elementary school won't appear in Campus Curse. 

With that settled, I concentrated on the situation at the university. Originally there were just two people there. I picked up a rather cliche stone and set up a zombie apocalypse situation where a group of students are trapped on campus with an army of the undead led by a power-hungry and revenge-driven necromancer surrounding them. The part in the Land of Dreams remained mostly unaltered. Since the protagonist is a comic-artist, there are a few scenes towards that feature her world.

So yea. I didn't want to give too much away while still reflecting on my experience. I tried a lot of ways to get myself to write, and found that I could definitely write about 500 words a day and up to about 750 or 1,000 on a weekend or on a day with more time. Past 1K it got harder, even if there was no shortage of scenes I still had to write. My writing style was, as usual, very sporadic and got very stuck in the middle. Instead of writing coherently from beginning to end, I jumped to whatever scene I felt like writing and expanded on that however much I felt like. When I was running low on inspiration I went back and finished or expanded other scenes. This led to an insane amount of in-congruencies, and I have a sheet  that's over a thousand words in itself and filled with notes such as "add __" or "__happened. O_O? Make it make sense" or my favorite: "TENSE SHIFTS". This jumping around really shouldn't have surprised me. That's how I write these blog posts too. The data above seemed to confirm that I write most under pressure T_T". I can also say I have fallen asleep typing now and am extraordinarily grateful that I can touch-type, because I probably wrote a good few thousand with my eyes drooping. 

Thus, even though the is a beginning scene and a final scene and a bunch of scenes in between, the story isn't really complete and it definitely isn't coherent. I'll get to finishing and stringing it together as well as finding a consistent pace. I hope I can keep a steady writing pace, even with the art projects this month and what not (more on that later in the post). 

I'm extremely grateful for the support I got from friends, the NaNo facebook group and my brother (who sat in my room and reiterated that "You're not going to make it" every time I did something other than write or study.) So thanks everyone! :)

December Art Challenges

Last December I tried my hand at a drawing challenge and got about 10 days in before something happened. Later, my computer died; thus only days 1-9 remain because they were posted online previously. Day 1 from last year can be found here. This year I'll be trying some similar ideas: 

The 30 Day Drawing Challenge was, as far as I can figure out, first started by Sylvia Tran, who came up with the version linked to above. It was popularized by Allison Lehman's version and the idea went "viral" on online communities such as deviantART and tumblr. (see #30DayDrawingChallenge on tumblr!)

For this challenge I'm going to be doing mostly traditional pencil-and-paper drawings or little digital sketches.

The 30 Day Drawing Challenge: Superheroes is exactly what it sounds like; a 30 day drawing challenge, but more structured and organized and focused. The original is here, I believe.

I'm actually doing this in Janurary, but I'll be sketching ideas as well. If it takes too much time, I'll just leave it entirely for next month.

I have no clue where I found the December photo challenge but I was linked to it from my friend's instagram on facebook and figures I'd try it as well. If it turns out to take too much time and effort I'll probably drop this one as well.

The "November is Writing, December is Art" motto seems to be a pattern with me. :) 

Other Projects

Aside from finals creeping up on me, I'll most probably be getting back to Sun Dagger and ECA as major projects and maybe a random story or so on the side. So expect the second part of Ani's cheat sheet....next week?

Thanks for reading!

~Minerva