The Wongery

So, it's December. I am writing this blog post on December 1. That means November is now over, which means the November writing challenge is over. So, did I succeed in writing a novel of at least 50,000 words? And, more relevant to the title of this blog post, what did I learn from the attempt?

Before I answer those questions, I'd like to explain the title of those post. (The day I write a blog post that doesn't include several paragraphs of digression before finally getting to the nominal topic of the post will be the day the world ends in flame and fury.) It's a nod to something that may be obvious to those familiar with the referent, but certainly not to anyone else.

I don't play Magic: The Gathering, but I have been listening to a podcast called "Drive to Work" by Magic's head designer, Mark Rosewater. And when I say I have been listening, I mean it's quite an undertaking because at the time I'm writing this there are 1,190 episodes, each at least a half hour long (I think one or two may have been shorter, but only by a few minutes), which means over 595 hours—almost twenty-five days—of material to listen to. I listen to the podcast when I'm in my car; I work at different locations that are often relatively far from my apartment, so I end up driving a lot for my job... which means, yes, although I honestly didn't think of this until just now as I was writing this sentence, I've been listening to "Drive to Work" while driving to (and from) work. Anyway, I'm on episode 1021, so I've got a ways to go, but the end is in sight.

When Rosewater talks in his podcast about storytelling or worldbuilding, I have serious disagreements with much of what he says, and one or two of his podcasts on those topics have made me really grit my teeth. But I listen to his podcast for his discussion of game design, a topic on which I think he does have valuable insights— as he should, having been head designer for an immensely popular and lucrative game for more than two decades. (Well, less than that when he started the podcast.) But anyway, while his podcast ranges over various topics, there are certain themes and subjects he returns to, and certain connected series of episodes within the podcast, and one of those is his "Lessons Learned" series, in which he discusses, well, the lessons he learned by making various Magic sets. So, anyway, I don't plan to make an ongoing serious out of this, but that's what this blog post is going to be about: the lessons I learned while attempting the November novel-writing challenge this year.

But not quite yet, because I haven't digressed enough to satisfy my mandated digression quota (I do not, of course, actually have a mandated digression quota, which is probably obvious and goes without saying, but I have apparently chosen to say it anyway, therefore lengthening the digression). First, I'm going to talk about the burning question that would be on anyone's mind, if anyone were actually reading this post, and if anyone actually cared about what I had done for November novel-writing month: namely, did I finish the novel? Did I complete the challenge?

Well, yes and no. Or, more accurately, no and yes.

As of my previous blog post, made four days ago, I had written a total of thirteen thousand, one hundred and seventy words. This meant that in order to complete fifty thousand words by the end of the month, I would have to average at least 9,207 words (well, technically 9,207.25) each remaining day for that month—including November 27, the day I made that post.

Well, I did not write 9,207 words on November 27. I did write something, but not 9,207 words. I wrote less than half that—4,358 words, to be exact. Well, that was still okay. I could still make it up. I would have to average more than ten thousand words a day for each of the three remaining days—but that wasn't impossible, if I really applied myself for those last few days.

And then the next day I wrote nothing.

I got somewhat back on the ball on the 29th, and wrote 5,293 words, which would have been quite respectable had I been writing consistently every day since the beginning of the month, but was completely inadequate given than I had... not been doing that all.

So. As of the end of November 29, my novel was at 22,822 words. Less than halfway to 50,000. It might have looked hopeless, but it was still technically possible that I could make it. In order to succeed, I'd just have to... write more than 27,000 words of the novel in a single day.

So anyway, it turned out I had the 30th off, so I spent almost the whole day writing, and I wrote over twenty-seven thousand words of the novel. With just over an hour remaining, I hit 50,000 words (to be exact, I ended up with 50,078 words).

So^[1] Yes. I succeded in the challenge. I did it only by dint of a huge crunch the last day, but I did it. But while I technically succeeded in the challenge, I feel that I failed in two ways... which is to say, there were two ways that participating in the challenge didn't fully fulfill the purposes I intended.

First of all, while I completed fifty thousand words, I didn't make it to the end of the novel. I didn't expect going in that the novel would be only fifty thousand words long; what I expected going in (and what likely would have happened had I been more consistent in my writing) was that I would end up writing significantly more than the required fifty-thousand word minimum by the end of the month. It's happened before. As I said in previous posts, I'd participated in a November novel-writing challenge several times before; some times I finished; some times I didn't, but this is the first time this has happened—that I finished the fifty thousand words, but didn't finish the novel.

And maybe the fact that I have finished the challenge before is part of why I let myself procrastinate so much. After all, some of those previous times also I'd left the bulk of the writing to a big crunch at the end of the month, although not to the same exaggerated extent at this time. So, buoyed by overconfidence, I convinced myself it wasn't that important that I write consistently at the beginning of the month, because I figured I could make it up at the end. Although I guess maybe it wasn't overconfidence if I did, in fact, succeed? On the other hand, that success was in a good part due to luck, if I hadn't happened to have the 30th off, I'd have been sunk. And, again, it wasn't an unqualified success. I finished the fifty thousand words, but I didn't finish the novel.

And I didn't really do the other thing I was performing this challenge to do, either. If all I wanted to do was write a novel, I could do that any old time; I didn't need an official challenge to do it. As I said in a post in October, the main reason I wanted to participate in a November writing challenge was so I could do it as part of a community, so I could share my progress with others, discuss my work, and follow the progress of others; so I could compare notes and commisserate and, well, in short, so I could have some sort of interaction and (virtual) human contact. And... yeah, that didn't happen at all, at least not after the first few days, because for most of the month I was procrastinating and not getting anything done on my novel so I didn't have anything to share or talk about, and at the end of the month I was so busy frantically trying to get it done that I didn't want to take time out for it. So, yeah... I am a big stupid idiot and I do everything wrong.

(Incidentally, would it really have been a big deal if I hadn't quite gotten 50,000 words done by the end of the month? If I'd fallen a few thousand words short, and made them up early on December 1 technically after the deadline, couldn't I have decided it was close enough and declared it a success? Well, yes, I could have, but I wouldn't have. If I'm going to participate in a challenge like this, I'm going to do it by the book, even if nobody's checking to verify it. So anyway, yes, I really did legitimately hit my 50,000 words, though by the absolute skin of my teeth^[2].)

So, okay, eighteen paragraphs in, it's probably time to get into the meat of the post and write about what lessons I learned by doing this. Except I'm still not going to do that just yet, because I want to write about how the novel turned out first. I'm afraid this may be one of those blog posts where the nominal topic promised by the title ends up relegated to a few paragraphs at the end and the vast majority of the post will be me rambling on about other matters entirely. Sorry.

So... how did the novel turn out? Honestly... I'm pretty happy with what I've got so far. I mean, yes, obviously this is a first draft and it's going to need a lot of polishing and reworking before it's ready for publication, but there's a lot of stuff I like there, even in the rushed 27,000 words I wrote on the last day. I think it has potential. It's... different in some ways from what I'd anticipated; there's a lot more humor in it than I'd planned going in (not that it's a comedy; there are a lot of high-stakes action scenes, too, and I think (I hope) some good character moments), and some of the characters are... a bit more over-the-top than what I usually write? (I'm thinking in particular of the privateer captain; he's kind of... a lot.) I'm not sure whether they're too over-the-top; I hope not; although in one way maybe this isn't entirely a bad thing, because if I ever do get any works published outside the Wongery (as I've said before, this novel I'm (eventually) going to self-publish as part of a (futile) effort to promote the Wongery, but I still intend to pursue traditional publication for other writing not set on Wongery worlds), the more difference there is between my writing here and my writing in those works, the harder it'll be to connect them and realize they're written by the same author, which is what I want, because I'm still inexplicably determined to try to avoid revealing my identity here.

I had had a concern that perhaps there were too many characters—one of several faults I feel I frequently fall prey to in my writing—but I did a count in my head and, unless I missed some, there are twenty-one significant named characters—twenty-four if you count three characters who were dead long before the story started but are frequently mentioned and play important posthumous roles. (By "significant" characters, I mean they're important enough to appear in multiple chapters; I'm not counting characters who are mentioned once in passing and never come up again... although there aren't many of those, either.) Twenty-one or even twenty-four characters is... not nothing, I guess, but it's actually far fewer than I expected, so maybe it's not so bad. Heck, that's fewer than my previous novel , which had (I think) thirty-four significant named characters. Not to mention a way-too-long novel I wrote in my twenties, which, uh, yeah, I'm not even going to try to count the characters in that one.

Also, in my previous post, I'd mentioned that I was worried that at under 3,000 words on average the chapters were too short, but looking into it decided they were on the short side, but still within the normal range of chapter word counts. Well, the average chapter length ended up going up slightly as the novel went on, with the longest chapter (so far) now topping out at 5,619 words. (Maybe that one will get split into two chapters in the rewrites. Maybe it won't.)

The one last thing I want to mention before I get into the nominal topic of this post, which at this point it looks like is only going to really be discussed in a few paragraphs at the very end therefore leaving this post with a completely unjustified title that refers to something that occupies only a very small fraction of the text. I did wonder, as I was working on this novel, whether setting it in the Dreamsea was a mistake. I mean, that wasn't entirely my decision; I had put up a poll to help me decide which world to set the novel in and the Dreamsea won (though only by a single vote); but it was my decision to include the Dreamsea in the poll in the first place, and it was a relatively late addition. The Dreamsea hadn't even been listed in the index of worlds when I first made the poll—though I did add it there later—and it was only after selecting all the candidates from that index that I wanted to include that I thought of the Dreamsea, decided it might make an interesting setting for a novel as well, and added it to the list.

But the Dreamsea presented some challenges that the other worlds in the poll did not. It isn't even really a world in the same sense as the others in the poll; it may be a world in the very broad sense of... a large populated expanse, but it's not a mound, to use the Wongery's terminology; it's not a world in the same sense that the Earth is; it's not a planet or a planet analogue. The Dreamsea is a collective term for the interfaces between dreamspace and the atmospheres of all the rews of Charos; I knew that people sailed the Dreamsea on special ships, but—well, I'd decided little about it beyond that. And I certainly had no map of the Dreamsea, and had created no specific locations there. That was going to make it a big challenge to set a story there.

But I think I'm pretty happy with the story I came up with, and of course in the concept of conceiving the story I necessarily ended up giving the Dreamsea more development too, and some of the things I came up with while planning the story are likely to eventually become Wongery articles. I don't know that I'll ever make a Wongery article for the most significant location in the story, an artificial island called Redhook's Rest, because while I think it's not an uninteresting location I feel like its biggest hook is kind of... used up in the novel. (Although that's not to say other stories can't be set there, so maybe it'll eventually get an article after all.) But there are some more general Dreamsea concepts that I do eventually plan to make articles for, and accordingly I'll give them wikilinks here even though those links will be redlinks until the corresponding articles are written: scuttleport, privateer (Dreamsea), oh and I guess probably pirate (Dreamsea) too, and there may be more that will occur to me.

Okay. So now I think I've gotten everything out of my system and I can finally answer the question implicitly posed by the article title: What did I learn by participating in November novel-writing month this year?

Well, a lot of this I've discussed in previous posts, but I think they're worth bringing up again. First of all, I think I've really had reinforced the importance of planning. The writing process would have gone a whole lot easier—and I've had a much easier time making myself do it at the beginning of the month—if I'd planned the story out beforehand, as I'd originally intended to do (but did not end up doing). But more generally, I really need to set aside time for planning, and not be constantly jumping in just starting to create without laying the groundwork first. This goes not just for writing narrative fiction, but for writing Wongery articles, for my RPG projects, for... most creative projects, really. I'd gotten it in my head that my free time was precious enough I had to spend all the time I could actually creating, writing, making concrete progress... but the truth is that the planning is a very important part of the process, and one I really need to devote time to. (And, honestly, it's a part of the process I enjoy.)

Second, I've learned that setting a schedule for myself and setting aside specific times to work on different projects... actually works. I may not necessarily end up following that schedule and doing everything on it, but I do end up doing most of it, and it does help keep me on track and be much more productive than I would otherwise be. Good to know.

Unfortunately, the scheduling only works when I have a day off (which is rare), because on workdays I don't know in advance exactly when I'll be working and what times I'll have free. Which has really highlighted for me how much my job is interfering with my productivity for my creative projects. Of course, I need the job because, you know, I need money to live on, but my experience this month has really made me more determined than ever to get to the point that I don't need the job. To find a way to make money with creative work, so I can focus on that. So yeah, I'm going to redouble my efforts to do that.

And finally, I guess at the risk of coming across as a bit immodest (which I am, perhaps in more ways than one): I still got it. I used to write a lot more when I was younger—narrative fiction, I mean, not counting things like Wongery articles and blog posts. But prior to this, the last novel I'd written was fourteen years ago. I hadn't done any long-form writing in a long time; I had some ideas for novels I wanted to write, but didn't really get started on them. Now... well, okay, I haven't finished this novel either, but I wrote fifty thousand words of it. I wrote more than twenty-seven thousand words in one day! And while a lot of it is rough and it's going to need a lot of editing, there's some stuff there I really like! I can still write! I can still do this!

So, with the November writing challenge over, what I am I going to do next? Well, I do plan to finish this novel eventually, but now that the November writing challenge is over it's not a priority. I'm going to get back to writing Wongery articles, which I've been really slacking off on. I am going to schedule time to finally start revising that novel I wrote fourteen years ago, and see if I can get it into a publishable state. (The first step will be rereading the damn thing, since it's been years since I read it and I'll have to refresh my memory.) I am going to devote more time to planning.

And, like I said in the first sentence of this post, it's December. And yes, that means the November novel writing challenge is over. But it means something else as well. It means I'm likely to have a lot of time off at the end of this month. And that's time I can use to get things done. Last December, I managed to finally implement the custom namespaces and subspaces for the Wongery; I wrote the phpBB extension to let me embed blog articles in forum posts; I completely redesigned the Wongery site... I got a lot done that I'd been meaning to do for a long time. This December, I hope to be similarly productive—if not more so, since I'm going to be better about scheduling my time. I guess my main goal for the Wongery this December will be to finally get the templates and styling working for the RPG gamespace, so I can start adding content there. But I'm also going to make a push with one or two of my other creative projects, and see if I can make some headway on those... and take some steps toward having a more creative career.

Anyway, I guess I've said all I have to say for now. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my blog post. So instead of talking my creative projects, it's time for me to be making my creative projects. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye. (If... if you listened to the "Drive to Work" podcast, you'd get that reference. Maybe. Sorry.)