Tag: That's Punk

Lessons Learned from a First Draft

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I finished the first draft of That’s Punk at the end of October. I started it in June of 2022 (I think). The story idea seized upon me while I was working on other things and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I ended up blasting out the outline for it one night, thinking that might get it out of my system enough that I could concentrate on my other projects again.

It didn’t work.

I ended up coming to sort of compromise with the story eating my brain. I would write it on Sundays, writing as much or as little as I wanted and revising as I went along. This was new for me. I usually write a first draft as fast as I can and deal with the carnage later during the revisions.

This was how I proceeded for over a year. I took my time. At one point, I even went back to the beginning and revised everything I had written. I’d never done that with any other first draft.

After the big revision, I realized that it was time to start wrapping it up, but doing it quickly would not happen. I had too much left to write and too many other projects going on. For much of 2024, I was working on four podcasts as well as revising What Happened to the Man in the Cabin?, which needed a lot of work. Months of work. I didn’t have a lot of time to commit to a big daily word count. I settled on at least 500 words a week. It didn’t matter when I wrote them or how much I wrote at one time, as long as I hit at least 500 words a week. It wasn’t a lot, but it was consistent progress and that had to be good enough while I was busy.

The small, but mighty steady progress paid off. By the time I finished revising What Happened to the Man in the Cabin?, I was in a good position to made a real push towards the finish line. I went from at least 500 words a week to at least 500 words a day, usually more than that. The 2,500+ words I wrote a week rushed me along. I had given myself until the end of 2024. One final push had typing “the end” before the end of October.

The one concession I made in my bid to get the first draft wrapped up before the end of the year was that I stopped revising as I went along. Once I started making a set word count, I stopped looking back. It was full steam ahead. This may or may not hurt me when it comes time to revise the whole thing, but I’m not going to worry about that until I get there.

What I ended up with by writing a first draft this way was the longest thing I’ve ever written. That’s Punk clocked in at over 145,000 words. I never thought I’d ever write anything this long. I also learned something about trying new methods of writing. That fast as lightning brain dump of a first draft works, but so does slow and methodical. Some projects I can afford to have the patience on. Maybe next time, I’ll actually give myself a chance to do the revise-as-I-go thing for the whole trip. Or maybe I’ll try a whole new approach to getting a first draft done.

Even if nothing ever comes of That’s Punk in the long run, I’ve learned some valuable lessons that I can apply to future projects.

And maybe something will come from one of them.

2023 NaNo Winner!

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

For the 16th year in a row (out of 20 years with 17 total wins), I have crossed the 50,000 word threshold in 30 days officially making NaNo 2023 a winner. I hit the mark on the 28th and I used the last two days to finish up the first draft. Total words written in November will hit right around 53,000 and the total words for this first draft will be around 55,000 because I kept some of the original short story, but not all of it.

When I started working on the expansion of What Happened to the Man in the Cabin?, I thought I knew the story I was writing. By that I mean that I thought I knew what the story was truly about and where the ending was. And then I hit a point in the word accumulation when I realized that the story was actually really about something else and the ending wasn’t the ending. I had something of an outline written, but as I wrote, the story revealed more of itself and I ended up surprising myself, which always thrills me. It makes me feel like I actually know what I’m doing.

It also made the words difficult to come by about half-way through. I went from hitting my daily word count before heading off to my library shift to having to finish the day’s writing after I got home. I ended up gamifying my writing to get my words written in a timely fashion (I play a game that has ad breaks; every ad break, I’d write 500 words before I go back to my game).

It also didn’t help that I didn’t do a very good job of preparing my schedule for NaNo like I’d done in previous years. I failed to get as much podcasting stuff done before November and as a result, I ended up with a bit of a full schedule that made writing more of a chore than it should have been. That is not a mistake I wish to repeat and I endeavor to do better about that next year.

This year, though, is in the books. I have a decent first draft that I can work with to revise into something that could be pretty nifty. It’s so different from anything I’ve written before. Revising it will be interesting.

Meanwhile, my hope to keep up with That’s Punk while also doing NaNo did not work out. I made it about half-way through the month, but ended up failing due to other scheduling commitments. Thems the breaks. Hopefully, I’ll be finished with the first draft of that story by the next NaNo.

As for this NaNo, it was a little more challenging than I would have liked, but I’m not going to argue with the results.

I do love a winner.

What I Did at Camp

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

No, this is not about the time I went to Girl Scout Camp when I was in junior high (I think? Memory is a fuzzy thing) and ended up being put in charge of showing the younger girls how to make bracelets and then later in the week had to show them how to make “fishing poles” out of string and paperclips.

This is about my first time participating in Camp NaNoWriMo.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, then the concept of NaNoWriMo is familiar to you. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I’ve done it 19 years in a row (damn) and by now I’ve won more often than not.

Camp NaNo is a similar concept except it takes place a couple of times a year (I think April and July) and you set the goal. It’s not just for new projects; it can be used to add on to existing projects. Though the input is still words written, there are ways to approximate if your goal for the month is revising a project.

I decided to use Camp NaNo as a way to make significant progress on That’s Punk, which has been my Sunday story for like a year now. As much as I’ve enjoyed the leisurely, no pressure pace I’ve been taking with the story –a real departure from the way I normally write longer manuscripts- I was ready to put some real time and words into it. I felt that setting a reasonable Camp NaNo goal would be the perfect way to make that happen. After all, I’m terribly competitive with myself and I don’t like to lose.

Going into July, I had about 30,000 words in on That’s Punk, so I decided that a good goal was to hit 50,000 words total. After years of writing 50,000-60,000 words in a month, a little over 20,000 would be easy. The daily bar was set at about 655 words. Perfect. This was what I needed.

One thing I wondered about was how this would affect the way I’d been writing That’s Punk, going slowly and revising as I went. I was concerned that I might fall back into old NaNo habits and just try to get my words down as fast as I could and worry about it all later. As it turns out, with the lower daily goal, I gave myself time to look over what I’d written before and revise it before moving on to my new words for the day. I feel like this is a habit that I’d like to try to keep even for NaNo. It might be more of a challenge with a higher word count, but I’m willing to try.

I admit that my schedule also helped me tackle this goal in the way that I wanted to. Because I work ahead on Book ’em, Danno, I’m able to take July off from my podcast. However, this year, after months of working on a video project for work, I ended up taking July off from all of my non-writing projects, putting Here, Watch This on hold for the month. Camp NaNo was the only thing going for the entire month of July and I’ll be honest, after months of juggling multiple projects, it was glorious. But I admit that the singular focus probably aided in my ability to not only achieve my goal, but also exceed it, all while revising as I went along like I wanted, and not stressing myself out to get it done. I won’t have this luxury during NaNo in November. Podcast things will be happening while I’m trying to hit my daily word count goal of easily over 1,000 more words a day.

If anything, Camp NaNo reminded me how much I like writing, a joy I thought I’d lost for a long time before being revived in the last couple of years, and how much I want to spend my time doing just that. It’s not that I don’t enjoy podcasting. I do. But writing is clearly my first love and I need to find a way to spend more time doing that.

Something else I learned at Camp.

A little writing a day keeps the blues away.

Page-A-Day and Sunday

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

As I mentioned, I’m currently writing a page-a-day novel as well as something I’ve come to think of as my Sunday novel. I’ve been doing them both for a few months now, long enough that I’m ready to talk a little bit about each project, but more importantly talk about how different the processes have been for me, particularly in light of working on a NaNo novel at the same time.

NaNo, of course, is NaNo. I’ve finished it in 12 days, I’ve finished it in 30 days, I’ve totally failed it. My goal is to write 50,000-60,000 words in a month, about 2,000 words a day. After years of this, I’ve found a happy medium between outlining and pantsing, giving myself a basic blueprint of the story with room to wild out and surprise myself. It’s been a winning formula for quite some time (when I’m not cheating, obviously). The resulting first drafts vary from needing a lot of rewrites to just needing a few rounds of revisions.

Blasting out that first draft as fast as possible has been my way of writing for a majority of my writing career and it’s how I’ve done most of my projects.

Defending The L is not my first page-a-day project. A few years ago, I decided to shake up my creativity by writing one page a day every day for a year because as the adage goes, if you write a page a day, by the end of the year, you have a 365 page novel. At the time, I was looking for some kind of creative productivity boost. I had a general idea of the story, a few scenes I knew I was writing towards, and I just sort of let it unfold, day by day, page by page.

My current page-a-day is a little different. I started writing Defending The L this way because I wanted to write this story, but didn’t have time to devote to it to do it NaNo-style, nor did I want to wait until NaNo. I also don’t have the goal of writing a page a day for a year, just until the story is done. As of this post, it’s right around NaNo length of about 50,000 words and into the third act of the story, which takes a bit of a horror turn.

Defending The L also has the dual purpose of being a bit of a catharsis piece. It’s set in a library, so I’ve been able to vent some of my frustrations with the job through the story.

Like the previous page-a-day (which still doesn’t have a title and I haven’t looked at since I wrote it) and much of my NaNo work, this one is going to need some revising, but more than likely not any heavy re-writing. Of course, I’m not finished yet, so fingers crossed.

My Sunday story, That’s Punk, is an entirely different beast and honestly, it’s a little scary.

First of all, there’s nothing horror or fantasy or otherwise genre about it. It’s straight contemporary fiction, which for me is way out of my comfort zone.

Second of all, instead of writing this first draft as fast as I possibly can and getting it all out in one hunk I can shape through rewrites and/or revising, I’ve only been able to work on this story on Sundays. And when I do work on it, I go back and re-read what I wrote the previous week, revising anything I’ve decided needed changing while it’s simmered in my brain since the last time I looked at it, and then I add new material. There’s also no goal before I call my day on That’s Punk done. No word or page counts. Once I do my rewind and revise, I decide how much I want to get done that day. Usually, it’s a scene, or maybe not even that. I stop where it feels good. I’ve been working on this story since the end of August and I’ve only got about thirty pages written.

It’s so weird on so many levels for me. I’m writing something I don’t normally write in a way I don’t normally write. And you know what? I think I like it. There’s something indulgent about being able to take my time with a story, revise it as I go, and keep my goals fluid. There’s something luxurious about having this dedicated time to work on something on a day with no other expectations. I’m not rushing to get anything done because I have to go to work or I have errands to run or dinner to make. I don’t do anything on Sundays by design. Writing this story on my lazy day has turned into a form of relaxation for me, as strange as that sounds.

November has been an interesting writing month for me for years thanks to NaNo and the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel around daily life. But this November, writing three different novels, three different ways…it’s been eye-opening.

One thing about being a writer…I never get bored exploring and developing my craft.