Bringing the heat: Fortnight 14 of The Burns

St Patrick's Basilica, South Dunedin

Fortnight 14

Total words: 13,319 (85% on the novel, 11% on this blog, 4% other)

1^st week: 8,440 words (if you count the last Sunday of Fortnight 13, there was a 6-day streak of 1200+ word days)

2^nd week: 4,879 (just a messier week)

In context: this is my second most productive fortnight after Fortnight 12, but 8,440 in this fortnight 1st week is the highest single week wordcount.

After ten days of not working on my novel (friends visiting, trip to Catlins), I started reading through my manuscript from the beginning on the first Monday of this fortnight. By Wednesday I’d reached the end (circa 150 pages/50k words), having made some significant tweaks (moving the second part of a flashback to later in the manuscript, re-working some scenes, changing how a character speaks) which explains how I was able to keep the manuscript expanding on these days. There was also a lot of tszujing up/tightening at the sentence level.

As I said to my wife on Wednesday evening, this was the first read-through where I could feel myself enjoying it. Things were starting to click. The weight (or lightness) of certain scenes now felt right as they had their counterpoints in place (or I knew more about where they’d go and what they’d be).

There’s still a lot of work to do to get to the end of this first draft, but as I think I’ve said before, it won’t be a crappy first draft (or better not be). It should be more like draft 1.75. And hopefully I’ve been able to bottle enough of this optimism to carry me through the next few weeks and months of drafting (and the inevitable read-through where I feel like it’s all shit and what the hell was I thinking).

*

St Patrick's Basilica, South Dunedin

The first week I had two photoshoots and one interview. 

The interview was with the Otago Daily Times for their annual piece on the Burns Fellow. 

One of the photoshoots was with the ODT so they had something to go with the article. The other was for the Rogues Gallery of every past Burns Fellow in the University’s library. The photographer asked what I was working on, I told him a bit about my location scout novel and he suggested we head to the basilica in South Dunedin.

That place is fascinating. They’ve just spent millions doing it up, mostly the foundations and the exterior, and they’ve left the inside in a kind of sustainable state of decay. It’s very Italian.

I have seen the ODT piece or photo yet, but I've seen the one for the library and I'm not unhappy (can you ever really like a photo of yourself? Well, I can't).

*

I mentioned in Fortnight 13 that my internet at home was on the fritz. Well it took another week and a day to get that sorted. Or put another way, three phone calls and two emails with Slingshot, four calls with Chorus.

This meant we had to play catch-up with Game of Thrones last week when we finally got the juice switched back on. Having no internet (and rapidly depleted cellular data) is good for staying off Twitter, which helps stave off spoilers, so it wasn’t all bad.

*

The day after I stayed home for Chorus to finally fix my home internet, I stayed home with my sick son. The next day I had meetings with people in town for most of the day and man, I was really missing my office at the uni by the end of it. It’s gonna be hard to leave those 12 square metres behind after Christmas.

*

Last week was the first I noticed blossoms on trees at the uni and a few days later the red rhododendrons were out in force. 

It's not completely dark when I have to wake my daughter up (she's a good sleeper, too good!) and it's still light while I cook dinner. Are you telling me that was winter in Dunedin? 

Because that was nothing!

And I know there'll be shitty days every week from here to December. And there'll be that lamb-slaying storm in the first two weeks of September that should surprise exactly nobody. 

But geez. 

That was mild. Pleasant even. 

Remind me why I live in Wellington again?

Cold compress - Fortnight 10 of the Burns / 20 Week review

Fortnight 10 summary

(NB: this is for the fortnight ending 18 June, so I'm a week behind)

• Total words: 10,600 words
• 1^st week – 3841; 2nd week – 6759)
• Weekly imbalance - 1st week was a 4 day week after returning from Italy, and generally getting back into the flow.
• Split - all on THE NOVEL except 385 on this blog.

First 20 weeks in graphs

What follows is, on one level, meaningless. It doesn't matter how many words I write, or how quickly. All that matters is what ends up getting published.

But, as I've said before, quantity is a precursor of quality. And things like wordcounts help to keep me motivated, allow me to reflect on my practice and, hopefully, DO BETTER WRITING.

Bar chart:

This'll probably be too small to be meaningful (even if you click on it), so let me gloss it. It's colour-coded for the type of writing (novel, short stories, blog, poetry, essays, other) - more on the split between forms later. But it shows that I focussed on short stories in February to blow out the cobwebs, before sliding into the novel in month two.

There's a lot of non-writing days. Like every Saturday (except one) and Sunday (except two), and periods where I had people staying in Dunedin or was exploring (Catlins, Fiordland, Italy - that big blank patch on the right). More on which days of the week have been more productive shortly.

Camembert:

So, interestingly, non-fiction (blog + essays + other) is a pretty big slice of the pie. If you remove the Chris Cornell thing and the Recurrent Neural Network Poetry thing, the distribution would look more like what I'd have expected at the beginning of the year. I've gone and committed myself for at least one more decent piece of non-fiction (more on that in another post), but this exercise has convinced me I should probably start saying 'no' to things.

At the moment, I'm resisting a strong urge to go back to short stories. But I would like to find a way to carve out time later in the year -- like after I finish the 1st draft of the novel and before I start second draft, but that relies on me getting to the end of the first draft this side of Christmas...

Speaking of.

Line graph:

This is a little misleading.

When I open my working draft of the novel later today, it won't be 44,000 words, more like 36,000. These stats represent the cumulative total of my daily wordcounts on the novel, rather than the actual wordcount of the novel-in-progress.

So I've lost about 8,000 words already. This tends to happen when I'm starting a new section and I do it in a fresh word document, work on that for three or four days, then cut and paste the cream into the novel's main document.

Some examples for future reference that won't mean anything now: the Motta quotes between the first and second section (only about 2/3 made it in; these may be further slimmed down as time goes by); the Curio Bay insert.

To get to 36K after four months is okay, I guess.

I probably should have done a post at the start of the year about my expectations... If I did, I might have said 10K per month (only takes around 500 words every week day) as the minimum, but this wouldn't have factored in two weeks in Italy (and the prep for such a trip). Which would put me right around my floor.

So a little disappointing, especially as I feel the manuscript is getting a little flabby at the moment and I need to go back over the last 30 or so pages and trim, trim, trim. (But the other fifty pages have had that treatment already and feel tighter. So my first draft isn't rip, shit and bust. When I get to the end, it's probably my draft 1.5.)

Looking ahead, I should be about to meet and exceed 10K a month until I finish the 1st draft. At the moment I'm less certain about the total length of the novel than I was when I started. I'd have said 70-80K in February. Now, It feels 110-120K (about the length of THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS). But that's for the first draft - I may get savage in editing and create something sleek. May.

Doing the maths on this minimum scenario: if I need to produce another 80K words, that'll take 8 months but I only have 7 before the end of the residency. And what about Christmas and all the logistics of moving back to Wellington (probably have to go back a little early so my daughter's settled before starting school at the end of January)?

And I can kiss goodbye to my dream of a fortnight to work on short stories while I let the completed first draft breathe.

If I want a finished first draft by the end of November, I'll need to 16K a month. That seems doable. The last two weeks I've been able to produce around 1,000 words a day, so 10K a fortnight.

Doable, but not yet bankable.

What do the numbers say?


Which day of the week is my most productive? Part 1

NB: this is wordcount across all forms, not just on the novel.

This result really surprised me. In an earlier fortnight summary I said Tuesdays were my most productive days, which made sense as I take the weekends off, Monday involves a bit of working myself back into the flow, and Tuesday is where I still have the energy and enthusiasm and direction.

But Friday?

And what's up with Wednesday being so paltry. Do I run out of energy after only two days of writing? Or is it that I only have two days of clarity about what I'm writing before having to scratch around on Wednesdays to be able to be more productive the rest of the week?

Then I considered how these numbers were calculated. It's the average of all wordcounts from the given day of the week, divided by the number of those days thus far (19 for Monday and Tuesday, 20 for the others).

But what about all the zero days? Surely they weren't distributed evenly.

And they weren't. Of the 19 Mondays, I had 7 goose-eggs. Wednesdays had 8 non-writing days out of 20. But Friday only had 4. This seems to be a quirk of when I've been travelling or had people come to visit from up North.

This is what it looks like if you take all the non-writing days out of the equation...

Which day of the week is my most productive? Part 2

That's more like it.

I'm still surprised Monday beats Tuesday. This may be due to some of the blogging that happens on Monday.

And the dip on Wednesdays and Thursdays? That's something to reflect on. It'd be great to pull those days up to 1,000 words per day, though that might be quite hard given I'm already 20 weeks in.

Done and busted

The crash is over. I sent THE NOVEL off to my editor at 10am this morning. So, like, 14 hours before my deadline. Legend.

Of course, technically the end of August was my second deadline. Sticklers might point out that I missed my first deadline by nine months. Ah, sticklers, who needs 'em? Not me.

I declare today Stickler Free Day. And what better way celebrate than with a wee Q&A...

Are you happy with the finished product?

'Finished'? Eep! I prefer the term 'complete'. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. But a novel is never finished. My novel certainly is not finished. Someone is going to get their hooks into it in the coming weeks and at some point in the future I'm going to get it back with a list of everything that's wrong with it and the get not-a-lot-of-time to perform corrective surgery.

Also, not a big fan of the term 'product'. Sound like something my brother puts in his hair.

But are you happy?

Yeah. Mostly. It'll never be what I thought it was going to be when I set out. Or even what I thought it'd be when I was halfway. The last quarter came together really quickly and went down some paths I would have shirked earlier on in the process (it got a quite rural, almost Western, at one point; a bit Flowers in the Attic at another). But it's what was demanded by the engine I built.

Dr Frankenstein, meet your monster.

I'm pleased the ball is in someone else's court now. I've been working hard, both on the novel and my day job for quite some time. This last month has been kind of crazy. If I spent another month or two on the manuscript, I'm not sure I'd make it any better. I need to step away, see what someone else thinks.

How did revision go these last three weeks?

A bit like this:

Of course, this only shows the net result of all the additions, deletions and changes on a given day.

Here's another way of looking at the same data:

The first few days were about adding in little details and reading aloud. I was actually quite surprised at how the word count kept climbing. I thought I would be trimming more than adding.

That flat patch 23-26 August was when I was reading and marking up a paper copy. There was a lot of "cut" written in the margins, which explains the sudden drop in word count when I finally went back to my PC.

The last few days I've been tinkering.

I went through looking at whether I said characters' names too much instead of using pronouns. The next day  changed half of the "he"s and "her"s back to "Kemp" and "Mother".

Then there was the period I fell in love with semi-colons and the day I decided to get rid of them all.

Some other chestnuts:

• "like" vs "as if"
• "ships carver" vs "ship's carver" vs "ships' carver"
• "foremast" vs "fore mast" vs "fore-mast"
• "rarely" vs "seldom"
• "towards" vs "toward" (vs "to")
• "albatross" vs "albatrosses"
• more section breaks vs less.

The last week has been brought to you by the Control key and the letter F.

Wow, sounds exciting. Is writing a novel really as sexy and rewarding as you make it sound?


Don't forget healthy! Sure, my eyesight has deteriorated markedly in the last six months, but staring at computer screens for sixteen hours a day would make them better at focusing, not worse. Right?

And sure, I've put on *mumble mumble* kgs since I started the novel, but I'm just reflective of a national trend towards obesity. I'm sure the politicians will sort it out.

Is there anyone you'd like to thank?

The internet. I couldn't have done it without her.

Some questions I've asked her recently:

• Would someone say someone else has ants in their pants in 1919? (No, probably not until after WWII, but there were plenty of songs about ants entering people's pants, at picnics especially, before that.)
• When did people start using the term: 'sit-ups'? (Quite recently.)
• How might a Scotsman say 'tippy-toes'? ('Tippertoes'.)
• Would someone use the term "dolly" back in the day to describe one of those platforms with wheels and a handle? (Hmm, better just have them use a wheelbarrow.)

What did your editor say on receiving your manuscript?

Nothing. I got an out of office reply.

What are you going to do now?

Go take photos of birds.

Avian cheer / Bucky O'Hare / A cache of silvereyes

Avian cheer

I was in a bit of a grump on Saturday so I lit out for the territory Karori sanctuary to take photos of birds. I managed to catch decent shots of two birds that are notoriously hard to photograph due to their constant flitting about.

Popokatea / Whitehead

Riroriro / Grey Warbler

Even though that's the best photo I've probably ever taken of a warbler, it doesn't do the tiny bird justice. It's a wee gem in the flesh, despite its muted colours. A marvel made more precious because it is so oftenheard  but rarely seen.

As for the popokatea, there were about a dozen in the bushes around me at one point, behaving much as a [insert appropriate collective noun] of silvereyes might.

It was almost as if the birds wanted to cheer me up.

A female juvenile male hihi, which tend to be much shyer than the males, landed on a branch less than a metre away from me and stuck around for a good long moment.

Female Junvenile male Hihi / Stitchbird

And as I was walking back to the entrance, sufficiently cheered, the shags were splashing about in the lake, possibly to rise off the salt after a day on the coast.

Karuhiruhi / Pied shag

NB: NZbirds has an extensive list of collective nouns for birds but nothing for the Silvereye.

Does anyone remember Bucky O'Hare?

Sometimes the phrase 'righteous indignation' pops into my head. It's a nice sesquipedalian phrase. And when this phrase rattles through the deserted chambers of my mind, I don't think of justified outrage, I think of a spaceship in an anthropomorphic cartoon from the 1990's. I'd forgotten everything about the show except the name of the ship and that it featured a rabbit (or hare). 

But who needs memory when you've got the internet?

The show was called 'Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Menace'. Here's the intro courtesy of YouTube.

The theme tune features the lyrics:

"If your Righteous Indignation has suffered a hit

And your photon accelerator is broken a bit

And you're losing your mind and you're havin' a fit

Get the funky fresh rabbit who can take care of it!"

Gold. Pure, nineties Gold.

Possible collective nouns for silvereyes

A cache of silvereyes

A flirt of silvereyes (suggested by Claire Browning)

A flit of silvereyes

A galore of silvereyes

A gust of silvereyes (it is thought that the NZ population was established when a migrating flock in Australia was caught in a storm and blown here c.1856)

A lode of silvereyes

A lustre of silvereyes

A mint of silvereyes

A party of strangers (the Maori name, Tauhou, means 'stranger')

A profit of silvereyes

A purse of silvereyes

A scratch of silvereyes

A suite of silvereyes

A treasure of silvereyes

A treasury of silvereyes

A trove of silvereyes

A vault of silvereyes

A vein of silvereyes

A wealth of silvereyes

See You Zeg / Covers Playlist / Koru Milo / NZ Post Book Awards

Georgia on my mind

The other day I received an email from a friend currently teaching English in Georgia (the country in Eurasia rather than the US State) trying to introduce a Georgian word into English usage, at least amongst his circle of friends back here.

• zeg = (n) day after tomorrow, in two days time.

Its brevity appeals. I also rather like the sound of it. ‘See you zeg.’ Sounds kinda hepcat, kinda Brave New World.

In my brave new world of working Monday-Tuesday and writing full-time Wednesday-Sunday, I’m often losing track of which day of the week it is. So promising to check the oil and water zeg means I can gloss over the fact I can’t remember if it’s Thursday or Friday.


Bi-fold playlist for a week in which you doubt your own originality


Side A: Originals Whose Fame Has Been Surpassed By Covers
Torn – Ednaswap
Nothing Compares 2 U – The Family
Tainted Love – Gloria Jones
Mad World – Tears for Fears

Side B: Covers That Make Being Not Entirely Original Seem Cool
You’ll Never Walk Alone – Gerry And The Pacemakers 
It Ain’t Me Babe - Jan and Dean 
Throw Your Arms Around Me – Neil Finn 
The Letter – Joe Cocker

Side C: Spotlight on Manfred Mann (& Manfred Mann’s Earth Band)
Do Wah Diddy 
Quinn The Eskimo 
Blinded By The Light
For You

Side D: Hey Joe. Hey Joe? Hey Joe! Hey, Joe? Hey! Joe!
Hey Joe - The Byrds 
Hey Joe - Patty Smith
Hey Joe - Brant Bjork
Hey Joe - Tim O’Brien


Kiwi As

What's more New Zealand than a koru pattern in a mug of Milo?
(And yes, my desk is normally this messy)

2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards

Tonight the winners of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards were announced. Thanks to the live tweeter from the NZ Book Council (@nzbookcouncil) I can tell you that winners in the four categories were:

*  General non-fiction: Chris Bourke - Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of NZ Popular Music 1918-1964

*  Illustrated non-fiction: Damian Skinner - The Passing World: The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kowhaiwhai (also winner of most coloned title)

*  Poetry: Kate Camp - The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls

*  Fiction: Laurence Fearnley - The Hut Builder

Chris Bourke's Blue Smoke also won the people's choice award... and the Book of the Year (so he cleaned up, basically). Congrats to Chris!

The short-lists for each category can be found here.

As I post this, there haven't been any press releases on the winners (embargoed until 10pm I think), so I'm like, totally breaking news here for you non-Twitters.  (The first book award winners were announced ages ago; press release here).

And now for the comment portion of this mini-post: Meh. It's late, I'm going to bed (before I say anything that I might regret; if not tomorrow, maybe zeg, or the day after zeg).