Thoughts on the Write All Night experiment

Congrats to Jim and Mike. They didn't make it until dawn, but they were both productive, so I'm calling last night's/this morning's experiment a success. I didn't last as long as they did, but I still got some crucial work done.

Some random thoughts from my end:

• I regularly checked my email (for comments on my posts), my statcounter, and the other participating blogs. That proved a small distraction but a useful one. When my energy dissipated, I'd find Jim's energy still going. Jealousy and fellow-feeling prodded me back to work.
  
• I hadn't been writing in the couple of weeks preceding the experiment (life managed to get in the way), so I faced the double difficulty of not only writing completely counter to my preference (I work best just after waking) but also getting back on the horse. Still, I was so enthused by the prospect of the Write All Night project that I got back into writing relatively easily. Now that Write All Night is over, I feel the fire under me again to work each day. We'll see how long that lasts.
• I usually don't caffinate after mid-afternoon, so the cups of tea made it tough to go to bed at three a.m. After lying there thinking about the novel (and realizing something about a character), I convinced myself that if I didn't fall asleep soon, I'd get back up like Hulk Hogan always managed to do after getting "beat up." (Sorry, I'm channeling Bill Simmons.) But then I felt myself snap awake after drifting off and decided, yes, thankfully, I could fall asleep.
• Waking up this morning was tough, but I felt clearer headed this morning than usual, even if this post doesn't necessarily reflect it. That's a nice change after the last couple of weeks.
• Head over to JPG Writes and One Toe In to see their progress. Mike, as usual, outpaced us, but Jim and I are making ourselves feel better by mercilessly mocking Mike in back-and-forth emails. (Not true; I actually doubt Jim is awake yet.)
  

Write all night update

All quiet on the western front. Distraction-wise, anyway. But I'm writing--in two hours, six-plus pages. And since I haven't written in over two weeks (long story), I'm pleased. I'm amazed I made it this long.

Side note: I got a new laptop in December, and it only came with a trial version of Microsoft Word. And the fucker ended two days ago, so I've had to switch to writing in MS Works Word Processor. It's amazing how much that little difference makes. I'd been so used to the way the screen looked that all these little differences keep catching my eye. But Monday I can buy a cheap version of Word at school and get back to normal.

Back to work. I'm not sure how realistic dawn is. I had to break out the icepack for a jolt.

So much for no interruptions

I'm getting sleepy but hanging in. I'm on my second cup of tea. But it turns out writing at night has its distractions.

1. My next door neighbors. The husband can't smoke inside, so when he goes outside to puff away (where it's 28 effing degrees and "feels like" 17, according to Yahoo@#$% Weather), his friends go with him. Apparently they think it's difficult to be heard on the porch.
   
2. My dog. She's in the other room zonked out, but occasionally she whines in her dreams. It's damn cute and also distracting.
   

Blog, give me the child!

And we're back! Yep, that's right, hiatus over--Saturday night/Sunday morning is the time to write all night. I'll be occasionally posting as long as I can stay awake; JPG, our fearful leader, promises to do so as well.

And to prove it's fate, there will be a lunar eclipse on Saturday. Spooky. And that's the cause of my favorite illustration ever (for today, anyway). Read all the fine print.

In one week

The "Write All Night" challenge is one week from today! Well, technically, it's one week from midnight tonight/tomorrow morning. But really, next Saturday I'm going to wake up thinking about it, trying to save my energy. After 11 pm, I'll start brewing coffee. JPG, Mike, George, and I will be writing, staving off sleep as long as we can, posting updates. Go read JPG's challenge and sign on to do it. You know you want to.

This seems right to me

"So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one has slept or shopped or talked with friends." --Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Well, maybe not 100% correct, but close.

Less Artsy, More Fartsy

I mentioned in a post the other day that part of the work I'm doing on my novel requires some arts and crafts stuff involving posterboard. Well, I spent about 45 minutes yesterday doing the arts and crafts.

See, my novel spans over thirty years; several of those years I wasn't alive for (my oldest brother wasn't even alive for a couple of them), and a few I was alive for I don't remember so well. So I took two pieces of posterboard and cut them into three horizontal strips each. Now I've got a timeline of six pieces of poster with six years on each. Now I can list what happens when in the novel and what might be historically relevant (certain issues of Playboy, for example).

I doubt my own work here has any interest for anyone, but it's worth noting that there's precedent: William Faulkner did something similar for his novel A Fable. And now that I've just jinxed my novel by comparing it to Faulkner, I'm going to go commit harikari.

Forwarding a challenge

JPG over at JPG Writes has issued a challenge to novel writers: no matter how strapped for time you are, no matter how many excuses you can make, write one page per day. He calculates this at 20-30 minutes; I don't know how I'd calculate it, other than to say I've been keeping up, and it varies. (I have a minor addiction to a computer game called "Spider Solitaire.")

I've signed on and, with the exception of yesterday, I've been writing each day, accomplishing at least the minimum. Booyah.

Still, I have a question: I'm close to a point where the project will need research, planning/plotting, and arts and crafts (long story, involving cut-up posterboard; I'll explain in another post) rather than writing. So how do I calculate what I do? Should I follow the half-hour per day rule?

On a related note, I'd like to further the challenge for poet friends who may be skidding ever-closer to comprehensive exams: five-to-ten lines of iambic pentameter per day. (Please note: the novel challenge also applies to story writers.)