We went dark there for a while! It wasn’t a planned intermission, but it turned handy there in the month of November.

I set my sights on winning in National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), you see! And I made the decision with less than half of my 30 days remaining. I had a small head start, but 50,000 words is an awful lot, no matter how you slice it. But, hey — I did it!

I’ve made token efforts at participating in NaNoWriMo before, but always got waylaid by my perfectionist tendencies. I couldn’t just be happy writing “a story”, it had to my best idea executed flawlessly. That doesn’t mesh well with keeping up a daily word count.

My battle from behind taught me some interesting things about how to keep things moving when you need to hit a certain target in a writing session, and what sort of tricks you can use when you run into trouble. A lot of these are NaNoWriMo-centric, and focused on word count, but a lot of it is good advice when you just need to produce.

Create a short-hand code for “fix this later”. In my story, every now and then a word or phrase would get under my skin, and I’d feel I could leave it just sitting there. But if it’s not an easy tweak, that’s a good way to get off track. Instead, I started just sticking an asterisk next to the word so I could find it later with CTRL+F, when I had some for fine-tuning. Real-world facts I wanted to use, but didn’t know (the length between two places, say) became XXX*, so I could just keep moving to the important writing. Fact-checking is counter productive on a first draft.

If you change your mind, don’t despair: keep moving. After a long chunk of my tale, I realized a part wasn’t working. More drama was necessary. In fact, in the last chapter, things should have gone totally differently. Someone should have died. Did I go back to fix it so I could keep going? No. Reworking a big chunk of text can set you back big-time without adding to your word count. Note the change (in a separate place, or perhaps in the story itself, like “XXX HE ACTUALLY DIES HERE XXX”) and pretend it’s all fixed already. Imagine the way it should be, build on that premise, and keep on rolling.

Find a place where all you do is wage battle with words. My progress slowed to a crawl when I was writing from my PC at home. I finished much, much more when I wrote in one late-night coffee shop or another. Keep your eye out for the places with a good ambience, plenty of space, late hours, and free wi-fi (if you use Google Drive like I did). All kinds of things and concepts live in your house, and your brain is trained those are the things you do there. A new place has no preconceptions; you can assign it the associations you need.

A sub-optimal writing device can be just about perfect. My laptop’s battery is useless, so it’s not very mobile at all. Worse, knock out the cable and it does. So it is that I relied almost entirely on these tools: a Nexus 7 tablet, a wireless Bluetooth keyboard from Motorola, and the Google Drive application. The Nexus 7 is handy already, and can perform most of the tasks a laptop could — just only one at a time. With a separate keyboard, I could type just as fast as usual. And the device’s multitasking limitations, compared to a laptop or desktop, actually help keep the focus on the main goal: getting those words written.

As it turns out, 50,000 words isn’t as much as it sounds. If I’d started on the 1st of November instead of halfway through, it’d have been easy. And it’s not so much another way, too: I’m only about halfway to the actual end of the story I’m writing. There’s lots of events still to come. 50,000 words is really just a novella, like Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which is about 60,000.

I’m glad I made it to my goal by the end of the month, and I’m interested to see where the second half takes me. Even that won’t be the end, but revisions and edits have to wait for that first draft. I’m thrilled that this year, I’m already halfway there.

Welcome to twenty-ten!

After more than 2 months of waiting around, I was finally able to transfer an old domain I’d let lapse into poverty and make it useful again. Word to the wise: whenever you renew a domain, there’s a waiting  of between 45 and 60 days before you can fuckle with it, transfer-wise.

So now, with those 60 days finally passed, The Nth Degree resides at thenthdegree.org, making this all professional and shit. Being a perfectionist, I loathed to post here until I could do it up right. Incredibly petty, or amazing resolve? You decide!

I don’t know that I’m going to keep doing the long-format posts that have been the only things here for the last 6 months. Squarespace offers a highly-classy iPhone app for posting to your site & tinkering with various things, so I shouldn’t be surprised if posts begin to approach soul-of-wit length.

It’s nothing astounding, but the wheels in my life keep turning even as I let this house moulder and decay. Here’s some things that have happened between posts:

I kind of forgot to keep playing Dragon Age! I have a bad attention span with videogames; I probably “finish” less than a third of the ones I buy, which isn’t a big number to begin with. The last game I recall completing was GTA IV — and even then, just the main storyline, not the side stuff. Anyway, maybe I’ll finish it? I guess?

I also let World of Warcraft die naked and alone! Not tragic, just my usual binge-purge cycle with the game. I’m sure I’ll be roped in again come Cataclysm.

I started playing Mass Effect 2! It’s pretty great! I don’t think I’m going to get into any real detail about it here on the site, but it’s a definite step up in terms of gameplay, visuals, and best of all: storytelling. I’ll probably even play it all the way to the finish.

My job is more different! At the time of my last post, I was working in a “special behavioral classroom” (or SBC) at an area middle school. I now work one-on-one with a student at an elementary school, and it is AMAZING the change one year makes (the 6th graders I was with, to the 5th graders I o now). It’s about to change again soon, as I transition into supporting a student with autism, as well. I shouldn’t be surprised if the topic of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) comes up in the future; it’s pretty fascinating.

Thanks to that job, I have my eyes set on getting a place of my own! In this economy, it’s not as shameful to live with your folks as it might be, especially for the recently-graduated (and those poor fucks still trapped with the intestines of higher education). But I want out bad. I’m building up a nest egg to make it happen.

I bought an iPhone! That much should be obvious from my remark about the Squarespace app, but it happen just about a week after my last post. This is also thanks to the job; I got two paychecks at once, in essence, and flush with cash I decided the time was right. I love the little bastard. I’m past the gadget phase, and it’s now just a ridiculously useful tool. (And mobile Scrabble platform for all my properly-equipped friends.)

Still doing the D&D thing! Not DMing at the moment, as I’m letting a good friend test out the waters with a homebrewed campaign of his own. It’s only had one session so far, but I think it’s been pretty great.

I submitted a proposal to Wizards of the Coast and never heard back! They say they have a 60-day turnaround time for the submissions they’re interested in, and I never heard back. Didn’t stop me from tweaking the email a bit and sending it in again! I figure, until I see the article in Dragon that makes mine obsolete, I’ll just keep resubmitting the fucker until they accept it out of pity, disgust, or the simple desire to make me go away.

Some interesting prospects on the horizon! This is all speculation, but I’m crossing my fingers that a nice change of pace is headed my way soon. I’d go into more detail (and maybe I will later), but I don’t want to jinx it just yet. And actually, I’m being so vague this really applies to two totally different things. Developing!

I am become adult, destroyer of childhoods! My job is actually full-time now: benefits, retirement options; the whole she-bang. From what I understand, they want me to stick around fairly long-term. Multiple school years, if I understand the plan they have laid out for the students I work with and the training they’re giving me. It’s not public radio, and that does leave a weight on my chest some nights. But I’m hoping that maybe, doing this is what will pay the bills while I work public radio in around it; better still, maybe this will just be the stop-gap I want it to be until The Stars Are Right and I get my job at PRI and Cthulhu awakens within his lost city of R’Lyeh. Anyway, I’m also managing and paying my student loans on my own now, and I’m getting my taxes prepped without as much help as usual. With getting a place of my own looming in the near-distance, it’s a pretty heady brew.

Perhaps this time, yes? Forget those other times: They do not matter, do not count. Do not even exist, in fact; leastwise, not from all the way over here.

This post is a Beginning. Ideally, the End will be far off. A vast gulf of time and space ought to fall ‘twixt those two polar opposites — anything less, shameful and failure-ridden.