Author Archives: Jeremy Zimmerman

Yagh.

I’m at about 18,600, putting about 5000 words behind. I got less than a thousand done on Tuesday and just the base amount (1600 or so) done last night. The trap I keep falling into is trying to dig up some research that comes up right as I’m writing.

Tuesday it was trying to come up with a feudal equivalent to an acquisitions department. I failed to come up with anything.

Last night it was trying to find details about half remembered laws regarding a finder’s ability to claim lost items that they turn in. I’d first come across them when I was working Loss Prevention a Fred Meyer. I was kinda thwarted by the fact that there are a million “unclaimed property” Web sites out there that bubble up in Google.

So, yeah, sidetracked by random research. My hope is that I can make serious catchup this weekend. The worst case scenario? I have to start bringing my laptop in to work to write at my lunchbreak.

Having finished reading Twenty Years After, I started reading, The Atrocity Archives. That was probably a mistake. While I tend to do well at dialogue, I tend to suck at describing setting. I’m also not one of those broadly read super-geniuses that can distill vast amounts of knowledge into a tightly packed story. (Cf. Neil Stephenson, Tim Powers, Charles Stross)

So I’m feeling a little humbled. =(

Quick update

Well, poop. Writing yesterday was kind of a bust. Between errands taking longer than planned, a massive headache most of the day, and then going out drinking around 5… I only got about 1500 words in (for a total of 13500). Sleeping in till 11 after a long night of socializing doesn’t help either.

So I’m almost 5000 words behind where I should be. By the end of today I should be at 20,000. Between now and the end of the day I need to walk and get our car and then I’ll be spending most of my evening at the Wayward write-in. If I can get at least 3000 in, then I can probably close the gap down to 4500. Not great, but better than it could be. My goal is to get about 2K every night this week (except Friday, where I will be occupied all day). And then Saturday will be the first of another large pushes over a 3-day weekend.

NaNo Update

Got in 3,000 words last night, so I’m just over 12,000. So I’m about 4-5,000 words behind.

Random thoughts:

  • I’m now feeling very insecure about the lesbian lover spat.
  • NaNoWriMo’s been sending pep talks from noted authors. I was delighted to get one from Sue Grafton.
  • I apparently make funny faces when I write. I find dialogue easiest to write. I try to channel them as I would a character I’m roleplaying. Apparently in channelling I adopt appropriate facial expressions.

    I got the wife to offer me rewards for every 1000 words I managed. I was pleased.

    Okay, need to get back to hammering the laptop. I have errands to run this afternoon and a BBQ tonight. Hergh.

  • State of the NaNo

    I hit about 9K last night. If I’m pacing myself well through the month, I should have at least 15K as of last night. So I’m a bit behind. I churned out 3K at the write-in this last night. I hadn’t really expected to get much done, as the socializing at the write-ins is a little distracting, but nevyn522 bullied me into pushing for 3K. I ended up staying an hour later than planned, but I did it.

    Things of note:

  • The character I had planned on basing off of nuadha_prime bears little resemblance to the man. Well, aside from his strident dedication to sparklypoo GMing.
  • I find I enjoy writing my cast iron bitch quite a bit. Especially when she’s on a tirade.
  • I consulted Jen last night for input on writing a scene where the token lesbian couple have something of a conflict. She felt that my portrayal of the dispute brought back memories, and not good ones. I’m guessing I did well.
  • Had a small panic this morning. I’ve been trying to fix a problem with the laptop where it automatically logs into Jen’s profile. The solution I came up with was to just delete her profile. I figured “Windows will surely figure out how to get around that problem. It will just put me at the login screen. Because that would make sense from a good software functionality point of view.” I was wrong. It would just hang. Of course, this came up after I realized that I hadn’t backed up my 9K words. I ended up kit-bashing a solution of sorts, but it still wants to log in on to her account. I haven’t been able to find anything in help files that provides a solution.

    Well, I think I have about an hour of bookkeeping left to do still, then I’ll probably have lunch with the wife. Then I’ll be able to settle in and write. I’d like to spend some quality time with Jen, but I’m not sure what that will be. We do have Netflix DVDs on hand… My goal for this 3-day weekend is to get 9K in by the end of Monday. This will put me at 2K short of where I’m supposed to be.

  • State of the NaNo!

    I’ve been so busy this month that I haven’t had time to update this particular blog. I spent the first four days at AmberCon Northwest and most of my free internet time has been spent either working up my post-con report or frantically

    trying to catch up on wordcount. But I’ve got a bit of free time at work to post a quick status update.

    I’m just shy of 5000 words. Which puts me about 7000 words behind where I should be. But, still, I just need to get back in the groove. Due to my work schedule this month, I’ll probably have a lot of free days to just sit and write.

    I’ve been bad about emailing backups to myself, so I can’t access the latest draft of the document. But I posted an excerpt
    on my page on the NaNo site. I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do in terms of future excerpts.

    I’ve yet to work out how exactly I’m going to do future excerpts. LJ does have a size limit on posts. Last year I had a filter on my private LJ just for NaNo, but I mainly just linked to Word docs on my Web site. If anyone has a suggestion, I’d be happy to hear them.

    Dare Me!

    I will be participating in NaNoWriMo 2007. Up until November 1st I will be accepting dares for words to include in my NaNo novel. After that I will turn off comments. My requirement is that it has to be a word in standard roman letters. I don’t want to have to install funky fonts just to read your dares. But if you want to put graphics of words in the comments, that’s fine too.

    This post has been post-dated to November 1st so that it will be the top entry in the blog until 11/01. After that date I’ll turn comments off on this post.

    Thanks in advance!

    What My Games Are About

    Had dessert with ogremarco, sirriamnis and Mrs. Z last night. ogremarco has gotten pretty amped on indy games lately and is trying to encourage me to write a game. Having been down this road a couple times before, I’m a little skeptical. But I’m trying to keep an open mind. He did bring up some points that got me thinking about my own games and how I tend to run them. So here’s me musing on what I want my games to be about and what I’ve poached in order to accomplish that.
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    Frozen Misery of Centuries, Session 3 After Action Report

    Our group was a little smaller than usual this last session. Two players got plucked away by PAX and so there were just four people for me to torment. I thought it went fairly well. I managed to dump a lot of info onto the players and did so in a fashion where they couldn’t really help but share the big chunks. I think the only thing that nagged me was one player who managed to get himself a bit orphaned. I never know what to do in those circumstances.
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    Frozen Misery of Centuries: Session 2 After Action Report

    Had the second session of my Exalted game yesterday. It had a few logistical challenges, the biggest being a weird split in the party. Two PCs were in the “home base city,” where there was a lot of political intrigue raining down. The other four were in the middle of nowhere with an army at their back, beating up barbarians. It was pretty hard to balance out camera time between the two locations. With the one-month time-jump I’d inserted, there was a bit of strain on some of the believability for some of the NPCs withholding their master plans.
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