Summer (for traveling), fall (for writing)

[starfishstar]

I spent all summer traveling – to Germany, briefly to Belgium, to Iceland. Now that I'm looking back on it, I realize even more how unbelievably, stunningly lucky I feel to have been able to do that. (I mean, I was able to do it because I work at a school and have the summer off, so it's not that weird. But still!) I'll try to share a few pictures, whenever I finally find time to organize allll of a summer's worth of photos.

Okay, actually, here's one to start with... I walked past this view every day for three weeks, up in the West Fjords of Iceland:




The only unfortunate thing about this whole amazing, beautiful, stunning summer? I barely wrote at all. I'm still between writing projects, and it still feels deeply weird. (I posted the final chapter of "Raise Your Lantern High" just days before I left the US in June, and haven't posted anything but a tiny fic translation since then.)

I did manage to get about halfway through the first draft of a small follow-up story to "Lantern" early in the summer, but I keep trying to pick that back up now and finish it, and I just can't seem to get inspired. Even the process of writing feels unfamiliar – I've fallen out of the habit of it, while focusing so hard on other things (language course, music, etc.)

So:

• Does anyone who's in HP fandom feel like bouncing around ideas with me? Specifically about an 11-year-old soon-to-be-Hogwarts-student's first experience of Diagon Alley, a la Harry's first visit there in the first book, but with a very different backstory.

• Anyone have a go-to place for getting prompts and inspiration? (I do have a few pages bookmarked, I should browse through them.) I basically need to remember how to write anything at all, and a short fic off a prompt (not a daunting story that I've been working on forever and feel a lot of pressure to get right) might be just the thing.

• Or I should sign up for a fest or two. Maybe I'll do Holmestice again? Or dare to join Yuletide for the first time? (There's also maybe maybe maybe going to be a revival of hp_holidaygen, which is very exciting!!)


I've also been thinking.... I want to do NaNoWriMo this year.

Every year, there's some reason why that's not a good year for it. (Like, you know, the year I was packing up eight years' worth of life and moving internationally...) This year, too, is probably not quite the right one, given that I've earmarked this fall for "figuring out what I'm doing with my life professionally, and whether I'm applying to grad schools, and if so, applying to them." But there's never going to be a perfect year with nothing else going on. And I'm in a stable work/apartment/etc. situation for once, and I even have a local friend who wants to do NaNo too. So......?

Comments

[indybaggins.livejournal.com]

A picture! Ah, how stunning.

NaNo- yes! I'm a big fan and have been doing it for years, I'll be in Vietnam first so I'll only start on November 8th but I fully intend to make it to 50.000! Friend me on the website :)

[starfishstar]

Yup, yup, there will be more pictures, as soon as I have both time and regular internet access. (Neither of which I have at the moment...)

I've now got a whole group of local friends who want to do NaNo – we were talking about it last night. Yay! I'll add you to my mental list of friends who are doing it, for mutual moral support. :-)

And you're doing NaNo despite spending part of November in Vietnam. Of course you are. You're some kind unstoppable energy machine!

[indybaggins.livejournal.com]

*laughs* I promise that I am nowhere near an energy machine, I am one of the laziest people ever. I just LOVE writing, and Nano does get easier the more times you do it. This will be my 8th go at it, so I feel pretty good about knowing what I can do and how. Really, with some preparation it's not too hard? You do need to know what you're doing, I tend to make a detailed outline beforehand, but whatever works really, it's a month of crazy writing and just letting go of that inner editor, I always really enjoy it :) And yes, the more support you have the better! (or well, support, I'd say 'peer pressure' ;D)

[starfishstar]

I still maintain you're a writing machine! ;-) And I'm glad I'll have you as a fellow NaNo-doing friend if I do it this year, and I'm definitely hoping to! I'm lucky to have some local friends for support/peer pressure, too, for the first time ever. (Which is the only reason I think I might actually do NaNo this year, since I have friends on location who also want to do it.)

[nerakrose]

i don't have a go-to place for prompts/inspiration, but i follow gywo on tumblr (the tumblr page of getyourwordsout, in case you're not familiar) and they post resources and inspiration re:writing. they also reblog from this tumblr every now and then: http://sharingwritingprompts.tumblr.com/

i rarely actually use any of the prompts, but it's nice to see them go by on my dash every once in a while. :)

i don't think there's ever a right time to do nano. the way i see nano, the idea of it is exactly that there's no right time to do it, and that committing to do nano is a challenge to carve out time for daily writing in your schedule, whatever it may look like. (gywo is basically a year round nano, if you're more into that? i've been pledging to do 150k every year since 2012 i believe it was, and the pledge tracker (only for members) is an amazingly helpful tool. the 150k pledge works out at about 400 words per day. i've yet to actually make 150k words in a year, but i've come close a few times.)
i've only won nano twice (2010 and 2012) and camp nano one summer (2014). good advice for someone who hasn't done nano before: know what you're going to write. if you don't have a fic or story (or several) in mind, you'll be floundering and stressing and racing to reach an arbitrary word count goal for no good reason. the times i've won nano are the times i've had a story to tell and i won because i devoted my time to get those stories down. the years where i didn't have a story, nano quickly became a stressful chore and i left it in the dust after about a week or ten days, because it wasn't viable that year.
seeing as i tend to do well in even years (i'm allowed to be superstitious, right?), and i do have several stories i'm writing atm + two, possibly three, long projects, i'm going to do nano this year, come hell or high water. :)

[starfishstar]

Ooh, I like those 1-sentence ideas/prompts on sharingwritingprompts! (And those are just the kinds of ideas I need, too, because my ideas are always "how about this kind of character" rather than "what if this scenario happened," and merely the existence of a character does not a story make...)

I totally agree, there's no "right" time to do NaNo, which is why it's such a great concept – just do it, this month, even though no month will ever be the ideal right time. And the daily particulars of my life (steady job, my own apartment) are actually more conducive to writing than they often are, which makes this actually a good time. I just need to figure out how to carve time out of each day, need to think more about that. But I really do want to do it.

And think you're advice to know what I want to write before going into it is very good – I've been thinking about that a lot. The last time I did something similar to this (writing the first section of a novel by a deadline) I learned exactly that: just starting and figuring out the story as I go works okay for short stories, but that is *not* enough to carry me all the way through a novel. That's my other big sticking point, that I don't yet have an idea, and need to find one before November. (This is the same thing I've been writing and bemoaning about for a while now, that I have some vague thoughts of "this genre might be interesting to write in" or "ooh, what about a character something like this" but nothing more concrete has emerged yet, and it still hasn't, and it still hasn't.) Luckily, I've got another friend here who's in the same boat, and we're going to meet up soon and brainstorm some ideas together!

And you're doing NaNo too, yay! This is awesome, I know a whole bunch of people both online and in my town who are doing NaNo – that's more community than I've ever had in past years where I thought about NaNo, and that makes me hopeful about actually doing it.

[nerakrose]

i'm glad it's helpful :D

yeah, and i think another thing about nano worth thinking about is WHY you are doing it. what do you hope to achieve by participating? is it to finish a draft? outline six novels? write one short story per day?
if you're doing nano just to do it, then what is the point?
and if you're doing nano because "everyone else is" or because "that's what real writers do", well, then what's the point?
just make sure that you're doing nano for the right reasons, or honestly it won't be a good experience. i've been doing it for long enough now that i know the difference between trying to live up to an arbitrary ideal that isn't even my own and between wanting to write a story of my own and using nano as the motivational tool). breaking it down into smaller bits helps too, looking at 50k/month can be as impassable as a mountain, but 500 words/day are as easily done as taking just a few steps towards the mountain.

:D i try not to use the nano website too much tbh, as i'm too easily prone to procrastination and the forums on there can be real time suckers. but that said, i'll friend anyone who's also doing nano, because i like seeing the word count bars change from day to day :D

[starfishstar]

Ergggh, yeah, all the questions you ask here are really good questions! And I've been thinking about this a bunch, actually, even though I hadn't had a chance to respond here yet.

Your comment coupled with my own previous experiences reminds me that I will definitely crash and burn (or at least run out of steam) if I don't go into this with a clear outline. (Goal is no problem, I always have a goal – but a *plan*, now that's another thing entirely!)

Precisely for this reason, I sat down yesterday with a friend to talk through some possible ideas for stories we want to write, and I'm feeling hopeful for the first time! I still have a lot of brainstorming and outlining to do, but I finally feel like I might have some maybe actual worth-pursuing ideas, and that's what I need in order to start – like you said, a specific story I want to tell and the opportunity to use NaNo towards that, not just as an arbitrary assignment to write 50k words just because I "should."

Anyway, thank you for this comment, which highlighted some things I know already, but needed to think about harder. :-)

[nerakrose]

haha, that's my counselling training at work XD a big part of that job is to ask the provocative questions to make the other person really think about the issue they came to me with. :) i'm glad it helped! :D

[starfishstar]

That's really cool – you're clearly good at asking the right questions!