Casanova Progress: Oct - Dec 2016

I was going to post a 2016 reflection, but honestly, I don't feel like it. I think we all know how 2016 has been. I don't have anything all that much different to report.

But I do have this I can do! This is at least something I'm proud of from this year.

October wasn't all that productive for Casanova (only 3k words), but I was also trying to stockpile ideas and prevent myself from burning out before NaNo even started. I dedicated a lot of my time into getting all my ducks in a row for November. (Whether or not it was successful is a toss-up, I guess.) 

NaNo itself was a success! This was my second-highest word count in the four years I've been doing it. (The highest was the first time I did it, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to beat that lol.) I followed my outline and was a lot more productive in terms of getting the story itself down on paper, instead of just writing 2k worth of filler / character exploration every day like I did in 2015. 

I was also a lot more productive at staying on task lol. I kept up my word count steam for a couple days even after I won, and I only wrote 3.5k for projects other than Casanova. Last year's chart for comparison: 

 Last year after NaNo I had a really bad burn-out and got less than 5k written during the entirety of December. I was determined not to let that happen again this year (mainly because I've been keeping with my "500 words every day" goal and I'm a sore loser). NaNo and a lot of writers also talk about giving your manuscript some time to rest before you come back to it, so I actually set out at the beginning of the month with the goal to write nothing for Casanova in December.

I was hoping to turn around and start drafting Sugar Plum, which was something I wanted to do last year. That didn't go as planned but at least I got some progress for it.

This screenshot is from the 29th, before I did my writing for the day

I've actually started writing for a couple different newer projects (most of which are just nested under Duality) and I've decided I want to keep going with this theme of exploring new ideas. Usually I don't start writing for anything until I've spent a lot of time brainstorming and such, but it's been fun to just jump into ideas without really knowing where I'm going.

The other day I did finally sit down and try to put Casanova's draft in readable order, since I'm awful at writing chronologically. The only problem is that 24k of it was never assigned a place in the outline and therefore takes some more work to stick into the timeline 눈_눈 I'm hoping to keep working on that soon but I haven't had much motivation since then ... I might just read through the in-order draft as-is and then go back and fill it out with the other 24k and any other writing that I've done in the past and can still use.

All in all, I've written 139,100 words for Casanova this year! I'm really proud of the progress I made towards it in 2016 and I'm hoping to keep that momentum going. I'm gonna try and devote 2017 to revisions and sharing it with other people (which is ......... stressful lol) but I'm definitely looking forward to polishing this mess up!

NaNo 2016 Reflection

Time for another NaNo recap! This month went by so quickly (;° ロ°)

This year I did Casanova again since I'd done some development for it since last November. I hadn't made as much writing progress as I'd wanted, so I knew NaNo was my only real chance of getting the ideas into any semblance of a working draft. This year I actually made an outline and everything and actually used it!

And I can officially say that the outline helped me through the month! I got through the outline a lot faster than I expected, so the last week or so of my writing is completely filler, but that's better than last year lol. I haven't tried to put my draft together in readable order (I made it about three days of writing chronologically before giving up) but if everything went well I should have everything I need to get from the beginning of the story to the end! 

Well, the end is still kind of open-ended, but I'm planning to fix that up after reviewing the draft. I'm also expecting to pull some of my writing from this past year (and even 2015's NaNo) to stick into the draft because there are some scenes I still like but didn't re-write this past month. 

Here's my chart on their website! I made consistently better progress than I have the previous three years. Now that I'm in the habit of writing every day, it was easier to push myself to reach the daily word count goal. And I did it up until I won! I slacked off the last four days after that lol. 

Here's what it looks like day by day.

I'm really glad that I decided to do Casanova over a newer idea. I'm really looking forward to getting it together to share with people, and hopefully someday I can maybe get it published. I've been going to Barnes and Noble a lot so that idea keeps popping up lol. Looking at all the books on the shelves is really inspiring tbh (•̀ᴗ•́)و ̑̑

This year I also did much better at staying on topic. I only wrote for Aperture once before I won. I celebrated my win by writing up an outline of Sugar Plum, which is a sci-fi Nutcracker retelling I wanted to write last December and never got around to. I don't know that I'll get around to it this year either, but at least I made a step towards it.

So yeah! I'd definitely call this month a success, and so far it looks like I can avoid the burnout I got last December. Ideally I'd love to get at least a minimal draft of Sugar Plum this month before Christmas, and then I'll jump into Casanova revisions in January during winter break. I guess we'll see how things go.

NaNo Progress: Days 1 - 8

I have four book reviews I still need to write and post ... but have this post instead.

I did actually try to write the reviews, but I wasn't making any headway on them. I'm writing this post the night of the 8th, and the election results are really stressing me out. (But really, who aren't they stressing?) I did manage to channel this anxiety into my most productive daily word count so far this NaNo. 2,788 words! I specifically wanted to beat the 2.7k I had on the 8th last year.

So far I've been doing well at beating the daily average NaNo tells me I have. I've been lucky enough to exceed 1,667 words every day, and on the 7th I even reached that goal in under an hour. I'm doing my very best to pad my word counts in case my month starts going downhill.

Luckily, I've got most of my school deadlines out of the way for right now, so I'm feeling pretty confident so far. My only worry is my outline -- while I did make one this year, and put a lot more detail in than normal, I'm going through it faster than I expected. I'm worried that I'll get to the middle of the month and have no more ideas because I've written everything I had in my outline.

Of course, last year was completely BSing any direction I had, so I'm not too worried about what will happen if I do reach the end of my outline before I expected. I can also always go through and make sure I fill in scenes that I skipped. I was doing really well at writing chronologically the first couple of days, but I'm starting to skip around again.

At this point I'm confident that I can put together at least the first few chapters and have something that can be read by someone that's not me. My ultimate goal for NaNo is to get the entire book that way, but I'm happy that I made at least a start on that.

I've been posting daily screenshots of my writing on twitter. I might compile them at the end of the month in my review blog post (or at least the ones I like the most). I'll probably make another update post in about a week since I've hit a blogging lull recently ...

NaNo Plans 2016

NaNo starts tomorrow!! I'm so excited and yet totally unprepared at the same time lol. I think that's how it always is, though.

NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words for a novel during the month of November. This will be my fifth year participating, and hopefully my fourth win! I've found that NaNo works perfectly with my writing process, so I've been looking forward to this since, like, February.

I flip-flopped with my decision for this NaNo a couple times. I was torn between some new ideas I've had and doing a complete overhaul of Casanova, which was my NaNo last year. One of my new ideas seemed like it would be a lot of fun to tackle, but I also knew that based on my track record so far this year, NaNo would be my only hope to get any revisions done for Casanova. I haven't made nearly as much progress this year as I hoped I would.

So Casanova won the decision.

"But isn't that cheating?" you might ask. To purists, sure. It's not a brand-new-sparkly idea. But I'm not breaking any NaNo core rules -- I've never used old writing or writing for outside projects to count towards my word count goal during the challenge.

My ideas for Casanova have changed a lot since last year, where I was essentially just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if anything was good enough to stick. I've gotten a much better sense of the characters and the plot, and I have a much better understanding of the setting after our trip to Dallas in December. (Which, honestly, I'm still in shock about. If nothing else I felt like I needed to pick Casanova again to honor that lucky break and the jump my parents took on the project.)

This year I'm actually going into NaNo with an outline!! I honestly don't think I've done that before. The past years that I've won have been complete literary abandon, as they say, and in the past three years that I've won I haven't been able to piece together an actual manuscript. I've got a bunch of writing, and a lot of ideas that I've ended up keeping, but nothing that can be read beginning to end.

My hope this year is that I can attack Casanova with a little more purpose this time and get at least one draft of every single scene I know I need to make the story flow from start to finish. I have a feeling I'm going to resort to a lot of bare-bones, uninteresting narration just to make sure I at least state what's happening rather than skip over it completely. I want to have something that I can hand off to someone and not feel like there's a whole bunch of unexplained stuff that I need to mention before they start reading.

My biggest challenge (aside from keeping focused) is going to be managing my time effectively. I've been doing a really poor job of it recently and I know it's going to take a lot of sweet tea and sheer determination to get me through November lol. I also have three final projects that I have to get done during the course of the month ...

Here's to hoping for a successful NaNo!

Casanova Progress: Jul - Sept 2016

It's time for another update post on Casanova! (A very pitiful one OTL.) I started this post series so I would keep track of my progress on the story over the course of the year. This will be my last post in 2016 -- the final one will be in January.

This is the same picture that I posted in my July Camp NaNo reflection. I did really well during this Camp NaNo, too, and that momentum got me some better ideas of the story (and my license lol).

August wasn't as great in terms of Casanova progress ... I went to Otakon over my birthday weekend and spent a lot more time stressing about school than I probably needed to. (Ironically, that part should've generated a lot of ideas for Casanova, and I think I did channel that anxiety into a couple days' worth of writing.)

..... aaaaand September was even worse ;;; I don't think I ever updated my post about school -- I changed my schedule to drop my TV production class and add three geography classes, all of which meet once a week in the evening. I've been having some trouble getting used to that schedule and I've felt pretty exhausted this whole month. 

Despite this seemingly slow progress I've made, I did finally start working on the first chapter, even if it took me past the first day of school and isn't quite done yet. I've still been doing a lot of thinking about Casanova, even if I'm not writing for it as much. 

I'm still a little torn on my NaNo plans. I would love to re-write Casanova from the bottom-up and see if I can get a more coherent draft this year, but I'm also afraid that I won't have enough motivation or ideas to propel me through the entire month. I've managed to win NaNo the past three years and I don't want to break that streak. 

That said, I'm more partial to doing Casanova again than trying my sci-fi Nutcracker retelling or another idea that's come about entirely from Pinterest. I do really want to get this story touched up and presentable to other people. Based on my track record from this year, NaNo is probably going to be the only way I'll have enough structure and motivation to get my re-write done ... One of my close friends is doing NaNo this year, so hopefully we can get each other through the challenge.

I still have the rest of October to decide. I'm definitely going to let myself rest and stockpile ideas so I can attack November with lots of ideas, Casanova or not. I'll probably have to put in a lot of extra work for my geography classes so I can have most of the difficult work of my final projects out of the way by the time the 1st rolls around.

[sigh] 

Hopefully these next few months will go well!

Camp NaNo Reflection: July 2016

Another Camp NaNo has come and gone! I only mentioned that I was doing it this month in passing, so here's some more detail about how my month went in terms of writing.

I did Casanova again with the goal of 15k, which was my initial goal in April before I bumped it up to 18k. I didn't change my goal this time (mainly because it never crossed my mind). I still reached 21,594 words by July 31st!

My word counts this month was a lot more varied than they were in April. I reached 15k on the 18th and started slacking off after that point lol. I also struggled a lot with finding things to write about, for both Casanova and Aperture, because July was kind of a lull in my summer and I didn't have too much in real life experiences to draw from. (The 3rd is a complete outlier. I'm still not quite sure how I pulled it off.) 

I still managed to write more than 1k for Casanova on four different days this month! The 31st was definitely a surprise. I got an idea and I was able to run with it a lot further than I was expecting. Overall I'm happy with my word counts for July. 

As for the writing itself: I made some more progress on the story and the characters, but I still haven't gotten around to writing the first chapter OTL. I definitely have a better idea of how to write it and how to fit it into the progression of events, but I need to work up enough inspiration to start picking at it. I'm still hoping I can get it done before I go back to school on the 29th. (Holy crap I'm not ready.)

In other writing- and success-related news, I passed my driver's license test yesterday!! I'm a fully licensed adult!!

Long story short, I resisted getting it for very close to a year, but I realized I would be inconveniencing my parents and my friends by continuing to dig my heels in. Also, I wanted to beat some of my friends to the punch. I have a really strange sense of competition. And some really lazy friends. 

One of the (many other) influencing factors that pushed me to finally book the test was actually Toni and Carter, the two main characters of Casanova. I've been writing so many scenes of Toni driving, and almost as many regarding Carter's reliance on others because he refuses to get a license. I finally got tired of doing the same thing as Carter and decided being more like Toni would be better. 

So, I can officially say that my writing has made me suck it up and do some Adulting. 

The next NaNo event is the Big NaNo in November. I haven't decided on what I'll be doing this year; I could continue my trend and try re-drafting Casanova, or I could do something new and try drafting a sci-fi Nutcracker retelling idea I've had for a while. I've still got a couple months to decide. 

If you guys participated in Camp NaNo this past month, I'd love to hear how it went for you! 

Casanova Progress: Apr - Jun 2016

These posts are supposed to hold me accountable to working on Casanova. I've been trying to get it to a point where it can be read beginning to end, but it's been an absolute struggle so far. And I'm still not holding myself accountable enough to the more behind-the-scenes stuff like actually planning where the plot is going.

I obviously know what I'm doing as a writer. 

I posted these two charts in my April Camp NaNo reflection, but here they are again! I did really well with writing consistently for Casanova the entire month. I honestly rely on NaNo because otherwise I'm likely to make excuses. NaNo works for me because I'm a sore loser when it comes to goals lol

I slacked off after April. I felt kind of worn out from Camp and wrapping up the spring semester, so I didn't set any specific goals during May. I still had some really good writing days though! 

I didn't get much accomplished for Casanova during June, also because of burnout. (And I let myself slack even more.) I worked on two other projects this month, which probably also contributed to it. It's fun to work on a bunch of different writing projects at once, but it means that none of them get all that much attention. 

Anyway, I did have some good epiphanies about how to improve the story and some of the characters. It's developed a lot so far compared to how I was writing it back in November and I'm really grateful for it. I'm also really grateful for what inspired it, too, since I don't think it would've happened without how my May and June transpired.

I also did manage to name some more characters and get a slightly better idea of a timeline, so I'm hoping that July's Camp NaNo will help me out a lot. (I'm doing well so far!) I definitely want to have a solid first chapter by the time school starts up again, but we'll see how that goes. I'm still really unsure of how I want to start the story in terms of Toni's narration.

Hopefully I'll have more posts about Casanova coming up soon! I've drafted a couple but I don't know when I'll finish them. (OTL.)

Camp NaNo Results Apr 2016

April and Camp NaNo are officially over! (And I'm a week out from finals, crying forever.) I didn't make an update post because of how my post schedule worked out, so here's just the final wrap up!

I chose Casanova like I did for the November NaNo in 2015. My word count goal for this month was 15k, but I also set a stretch goal of 18k. Which I then upped to 20k.

My final word count was 22,539! This averages out to 777 words a day.

I really like line graphs ... Anyway, I had a couple days this month where I was busy or pretty uninspired, but I managed to meet the minimum word count goal of 500 words each day! I'm really proud of how I did. 

This is the bar graph combined with the rest of the writing I did this month. I worked on Aperture some, but it only adds up to 6.5k. I wanted to work more on it the past couple days but couldn't find the inspiration to write anything. 

I wrote 29k total this month between the two stories, which met the goal I'd set of 25k total. I'd totally forgotten about this goal until now and I'm surprised that I still beat it nonetheless ;; 

I made a chart of my Camp average word count over the course of the month. This was completely unnecessary in all honesty but I think it's cool to see how it changed over the course of the month. (I also should've made it orange tbh)

I did a lot of story development this month! I finally named two main characters and I found a better reasoning for source of the main conflict. I also succeeded in using Casanova over Aperture in terms of writing out my experiences and feelings of the day. Most of them were scenes of Carter procrastinating on various homework assignments.

(Not hard to guess what I did a lot of this month.) 

I think I burned myself out this month, though, and I still need to do some fine-tuning before I can fill in all the scenes I keep skipping in favor of Toni yelling at Carter to do his work. (Toni was the voice of my conscious this month ngl.) 

May is looking to be pretty busy and chaotic so far, so I'm going to let back on my goals for this month and just keep it at 500 words a day in general. I'm going to give Casanova a break and hopefully give Aperture the attention it didn't get in April. I'd also like to poke at a couple ideas I haven't done much with.

All in all I'm really happy with how I did this month! ♥

Casanova Progress: Jan - Mar 2016

These posts are supposed to help keep me accountable for my Casanova progress over the course of the year. I can't say that they'll really work, but I say that about everything else pretty much. And it doesn't hurt to try. 

I made a post about my writing progress in general back in mid February, so I'm gonna do my best not to repeat anything I said then.

This was my total word count chart for January. I was still trying to recover from NaNo burnout, so I spent a lot of time working on Aperture since it was easier for me to write. I think it was good to give Casanova a down time of about two months before I picked it up again. I got about 1k words written the three days in January that I wrote for it. 

This is the chart I made for February. (I should've labeled the pictures, whoops.) I pushed myself to write at least 100 words a day for Casanova starting Feb 1st and it worked really well! I had some really good days where I got a lot of writing done. My average was about 375 words each day. 

Most of these are vignettes or scenes I wasn't really planning on using. I wrote a lot of fluff to get back into the habit of working on the story, but it also helped me decide on some key elements of the story I didn't touch before. 

This is my March chart. I thought I did better during March, but Excel is telling my average was about 331 words a day ... :{ I think I also had more motivation and ideas for Aperture than I did for Casanova. 

In regards to what I've actually written: I don't think I'm much closer to being able to having a complete draft, but I have done some decision-making on things that I left up in the air during NaNo. I've also been refining character relationships and interactions and what effect they have on the plot.

I wanted to get a full outline done by March 31st to have for Camp NaNo, but I completely slacked on it. I finally started it during NaNo and I'm counting it towards my word count. Which is probably cheating if you think about it. I don't think I've made any other effort to make a timeline, though, so it's coming in handy. Trying to write the whole story in bullet points is actually fun.

My goals for the next three months:

• assign names to the rest of the cast (which I was really supposed to do during March)
• actually use the outline I wrote and maybe get some feedback on it
• figure out which scenes I need that I've been avoiding and try to tweak or work around them

Hopefully things will go as planned! I'll have a post up at the end of the month to talk about how Camp NaNo went. 

Camp NaNo Plans April 2016

This is my 5th Camp NaNo! I love the November NaNos to death, but I think Camp NaNos are a little more fun. They're more flexible with word counts and they usually happen twice a year c: And cabins are really fun even if I never talk to my cabin mates OTL

In case the picture wasn't enough of a clue, I'm going to be working on Casanova this time! I realized during NaNo 2015 that I wasn't nearly as prepared as I needed to be. My plan was to work hard behind the scenes between December and March so I could attack the April Camp NaNo and fill in all the holes I left in my first draft.

... which didn't really happen. I've been doing really well with writing every day, but I haven't done as much research and planning as I was hoping. I've still got a couple days to catch up, so hopefully I'll step it up! (Probably not.)

My word count goal is 15k, which is 500 words a day. That's pretty low of a goal for me, but I'd rather have a realistic goal than overshoot and then fall short. I'm also going to have a lot of school work in April as the semester gets ready to end the second week of May.

I'm doing the same thing as I did in November and only counting Casanova towards my word count goal. I'm hoping that I can reach 25k total including Aperture and any of the other stories I work on, and I also have a stretch goal of writing 18k for Casanova, assuming everything goes well this month.

I have a couple more Camp-related posts coming up in the next month or so! I don't know if you can friend people like you can on the main NaNo website, but here's my profile if you wanna see my progress or send me a message! I'd love to hear from other people participating this April! ♥

Wanderlust: Las Vegas and SoCal

I've been turning to my experiences from our June vacation a lot in my writing recently, and with this awesome warm weather we've had the past couple days, nostalgia and wanderlust have pretty much smacked me in the face. Multiple times. 

So I went through my camera roll and picked some photos to compile them all into one post! I'm almost certain all of these ended up in the original blog posts I made, but they're spread out and I wanted to be able to look through them all at once. So I can torture myself even more.

These are mostly the photos I'm most nostalgic for right now, especially in regards to my recent writing, but by no means are these all my favorite pictures. There's too much of this trip to try and condense everything down to one post.

Casanova To-Do: Jan 2016

I figured blogging about it would make me more accountable. I don't know. That hasn't worked with my TBRs before, but it won't hurt, right?

"I designed my school's literary magazine," I tell myself as I make images like this.

I'm going to try and keep this list simple because otherwise I would just balk at it.

No, screw it, I'm not gonna lie. I'm balking at this list anyway because I am a lazy teenager and I don't like the thought of work. Even though this is something I'm making myself do for fun.

I don't understand how I function as a human being sometimes.

Anyway!

1. Fill in missing scenes

When I wrote Casanova during NaNo, I let myself write what I wanted to without making it seem "nice". I was struggling enough to hit word count as it was. Forcing myself to write scenes I wasn't excited about wasn't working for me.

This means my draft of Casanova makes sense only to me. Because I skipped a bunch of scenes and wrote out of order. Probably not the best idea, but hey, it was my first draft and nothing said I couldn't.

I should probably make a list of all the scenes I know I need that I didn't write. (Not here. In my sketchbook. But still. It would probably help.)

2. Put everything in chronological order

I have a better sense of the order scenes should go in since NaNo ended, but I still have a lot to work on. And a lot of it is dependent on step #1 and writing the scenes I'm missing. I'm pretty sure I wrote overlapping scenes at least a few days of NaNo and it's going to be an adventure trying to figure out what vignettes to use. A lot of the vignettes also have no context and can go pretty much anywhere, so the question is then where the heck do I put all of them?

I have my work cut out for me.

3. Replace remaining (xx)s

Like I said in my reflection, I used "(xx)" as a catch-all placeholder, which ended up making my life harder. I've only defined one of the values I used (xx) for. I still have a lot of characters to name and situations to explain.

Luckily my cousin has been a godsend and helping me name characters when I tweet at her. I should really enlist her help more. And probably buy her chocolate for all the decision-making she does for me.

4. Determine in-book universe laws

Not only did I skip a bunch of scenes in the first draft, I didn't really bother coming up with how their universe works, either. There are a lot of things regarding how Hell is supposed to work that I was just like ┐(° ヘ° )┌  and left them as plot holes.

This is probably gonna be the hardest part and it's likely not gonna be "done" until at least a few drafts in. I definitely went into NaNo with less planning done than I usually do and I wrote with a very ┐(° ヘ° )┌ attitude the entire month.

So yeah! I'm going to be very surprised if I complete all four. Or knock out more than half of these in general. I'm not setting the bar very high.

Since this post feels really short, I turned to a random page in my print masterdoc and screenshot one of the vignettes:

I have a lot of these kinds of vignettes that I probably won't keep, but they're hands-down my favorite thing to write. I'm almost tempted to see how many of these I can get away with in Casanova.

Ideally, I'll have at least the first two steps done by the time I go back to school on Jan 25th, but I wouldn't bet on it. The more serious deadline is by March. I'll check in again about my progress mid-March (if I don't make in-between posts before that).

Wish me luck!

Casanova Writing Research: Arlington, Texas

So in the off chance you've actually read my other blog posts / my twitter this past month, here's the explanation you've probably been waiting for!

One day I'll pick a standard format for these pictures. Bear with me.

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, I was lucky enough to go on another writing research trip to see where I set Casanova. My mom managed to get us cheap flights out to Dallas and back that fit in the weekend before exam week. I'd been asking to go to Dallas in order to do more in-depth research than Google Maps could give me, so I was amazed when it really did work out in my favor!

Why did I pick Arlington, Texas? Primarily because the songs that really brought Casanova together as a concrete story idea were country songs. Casanova is a collection of a couple different plot bunnies, and the song "American Kids" started to bring them together in my mind. My dad usually listens to country music when he's out in the garage and it was pure chance that I caught the songs I did. (I actually think I heard "American Kids" for the first time when I was heading to my high school for class one morning. That might've actually been with my mom. I don't remember.)

Anyway, "American Kids" gave me a really strong urge to set the story in Texas. The song never really mentions any specific place, but that was what my mind jumped to. My initial research focused around the Dallas area since we'd already been there and I was vaguely familiar with it. (Not as much as I thought, tbh.) I knew that I needed something close to a university because of Carter's backstory, and I think UTA was the first college I really looked at for the story. And settled on it since it worked out really well for what I needed. We also have an Arlington in our area, so the irony of that really cemented the decision for me.

So what did I learn?

Casanova Playlist

I'm back safely from my writing research trip out to Dallas! It was a lot of fun and I'm really happy that it worked out well. I learned even more than I was hoping to on the trip ♥

I'm trying a vertical post this time because it's supposed to be more Pinterest-friendly. I figured I should try it out. Let me know if you think it works any better. 

I said I would have a post about the trip up on the 24th, but I decided to share my Casanova playlist as a separate post. I actually had some troubles with this -- my original playlists are through Spotify and Google Music, but I can't share the Spotify one since it's connected to my Facebook and I can't figure out how to share a Google Music playlist ;;

I ended up compiling a YouTube playlist instead. I usually try to avoid music videos with sound effects or non-music time, but I made some compromises in order to minimize the chances of the videos getting taken down and breaking the playlist.

If this embedded playlist doesn't work, here is the YouTube page for it! It should hopefully play through YouTube if it doesn't want to play through my blog.

Please let me know if any of the songs get taken down so I can replace them! As soon as I figure out how to share my Google Music playlist I'll tack that onto this post as well.

Apologies for this post being really short. I'm still worn out from this weekend and I'm writing this post instead of prepping for my last exam.

I should probably at least include a little bit of an explanation about the music, shouldn't I? The first half of the playlist or so is country music (or at least country-sounding music) since that's where a lot of the aesthetic of Casanova came from for me. "American Kids" was the first song that made the story come together. After I went to the Halsey concert with my friend in October, I switched over to more pop / Top 40 music. I ended up picking a much more suburban setting for Casanova than I initially intended, so the playlist reflects both my initial ideas and what ideas I actually used for the story.

I hope you guys like the playlist ♥ Underneath the cut is a list of all the songs in case the links don't work. Keep an eye out for my post about Dallas and Arlington on the 24th!

Casanova: After-NaNo Reflection

Like I mentioned before, here's my after-NaNo reflection focusing on what I learned about Casanova (and my own writing) during the course of NaNo!

First up, I learned that I need a lot more pre-writing with my newer projects. I've been jaded because of how long I've been working on Aperture. I wrote a couple thousand words for Casanova over the summer, but my sense of the story wasn't as nearly as concrete as I needed it to be. I honestly ran out of my original ideas and plot bunnies by the 13th.

(You can actually see this in my masterdoc. The scenes get progressively shorter and less descriptive until they're almost all dialogue. It's interesting to see and reflect on.)

I've also learned that I suck with plot-driven novels. Aperture is character-driven: there's no overarching plot to it other than the characters growing. Casanova is the opposite. It was supposed to be about Toni completing three tasks in order to "earn" Carter's soul back.

So yeah, there's very little action in Casanova so far. I skipped a bunch of scenes I knew I needed eventually because the whole thing was too structured, and I knew I didn't have enough knowledge in order to make it work.

I also relied on placeholders a lot this time, which turned out really helpful. Only six characters have names in Casanova so far. (Six and a half if you count the Casanova's nickname.) For everyone else, I used "(xx)" so I would be able to catch it easily in re-reads.

Now, in hindsight, I should've used more descriptive placeholders, because there are a couple that I can't remember who they're supposed to refer to. I stuck to (xx) because I could ctrl+f the masterdoc at the end and find how many times I used placeholders. The answer is 597 times, by the way. I haven't checked what it is now that I've replaced Cynthia's placeholders with her name.

(It took me 124 pages to decide on her name. Casanova's first draft is only 182 pages. Also, she's named after my friend @jouycemanor, who was my co-designer on our school's lit mag (ღ˘⌣˘ღ) )

Just like with Aperture, my favorite part of writing this month has definitely been all the dialogue scenes. I personally think that the vignettes with dialogue alone are some of the strongest things I write.



I surprised myself by coming up with new details for the story. The biggest (and most helpful) was giving Toni the power to teleport. I'd known teleporting was going to have to play some kind of role, but I wasn't initially expecting to give Toni the ability. It helped me out a lot in terms of word count -- if I got stuck, I decided to stick Toni and Carter in a different city. Usually Las Vegas. They ended up in Las Vegas a lot.

Something I also didn't expect was Toni's deadpan sarcasm. Carter had it from the start, but Toni was supposed to be a lot less sarcastic than he was. And that didn't happen at all. I think it's actually better that way. I have a hard time toning down my sarcasm when I write.

Toni and Carter also started resembling people I know. Toni's was entirely accidental, and I think I'm going to try and remove some of her resemblance. (I base a lot of characters in Aperture off people in real life, and I don't really want to do the same in Casanova.) Carter's was a little more intentional in that I borrowed a few aspects of someone I know in order to design his background, and I didn't realize that said person had also influenced how I perceived Carter's appearance.

I got a copy of my masterdoc printed out at Staples on the 1st. Part of the reason was because I like editing on paper rather than on screen, but a big part of it was also being able to hold up this monstrosity and say, "Look! I wrote all this!!" (My friends can attest to this. I didn't shut up about printing it out for, like, three days.)

By the time this post goes up, this copy will be with us out in Texas! (That was another reason I got it printed.) I'm really looking forward to seeing Arlington, Texas, where I decided to set Casanova. I've already been on a writing research trip, but this one will be a lot different -- I feel much more organized and focused. I have a lot more to do in a shorter amount of time.

I'm hoping to have a blog post about our trip to Arlington up on the 24th, so please look forward to it! ♥ If you guys did NaNo, I'd love to hear about what you learned about your stories over the month!

NaNo Reflection

NaNo is officially over again ;o; While I'm sad to let go of the month, I'm very happy with how November went for me, and I'm excited for what December's gonna bring! (And not just Christmas, either. Though that is a big part of it.) 

EDIT 12/6/15: I found another blogger who posted a NaNo reflection! I really like reading about other people's writing, so if that's the same for you guys, check out The Quiet People's post! 

For NaNo this year, I decided to work on a story I had previously only written a few thousand words for. Aperture helped me win the past two years, but this year I wanted to work on a story I would honestly consider publishing traditionally.

(That's a long story, and maybe I'll make a blog post about it in the near future.)

Anyway, I chose Casanova and I stuck with it!

Well, for the most part, anyway. Around the 10th I learned that Miraculous Ladybug, a show I had been waiting for since at least last year, had finally started airing. And as a children's show based around magical kids, I got a lot of good ideas ... for Aperture.

I knew I couldn't quit writing Aperture for an entire month, so I decided back in October that I would let myself write for it but not include it in my NaNo word counts -- I mean, it's definitely not Casanova, so I felt it was cheating to include Aperture. Counting only Casanova meant I actually had to work on Casanova.

My theory didn't quite work like I wanted it to, but it worked nonetheless! Around the middle of the month I slacked off on Casanova, but once I had written Aperture and ML out of my system, I made myself focus.

I used my Computer Science skills to make myself a nifty Excel spreadsheet c: (We used Excel for, like, a week in class. I'm amazed that I managed to rig it up the way I did, making it do math for me and everything.) The blue bars are for Casanova, and the red bars are for Aperture. 

Surprisingly, I only worked on Aperture for 8 days! I was sure I was going to work on it a lot more than that. I think I definitely needed the creative break from Aperture this month. Everything I wrote in November I considered AU / otherwise not canon to the story I've been working on. 

I'm not sure how to really explain the 28th. It was mainly because I was so close to winning that I wouldn't go to bed until I had hit 50,000 words. I wrote 4,155 words the 28th alone. It's not quite as impressive as the 8k I wrote on Nov 30th back in 2013, but hey, it looks cool on the chart. My second most impressive day was the 7th, aka #doubleUpDay. 

This year was the first time I could participate in Double Up Day, and I'm glad I did! I donated under both my name and a friend's so we'd both get donator halos, and I received some cool sponsor goodies B) I'm saving the sticker for something special (my next writing notebook, probably), but I'm hoping to put the bracelet and bookmark to good use. 

In hindsight, I should have done some more pre-writing and planning. The ideas I had for Casanova only lasted me so long, so a lot of my writing for the month was straight-up dialogue or scenes I improvised completely. I owe a lot to Chris for taking me out driving to various places "for writing research", and also letting me try to talk through the plot out loud. 

I skipped three days of writing for Casanova. Two of the days I took off from writing completely because I had no down time, and one of the days I focused on Aperture and didn't push myself to do Casanova at all. My final word count for Casanova was 51,055 and my total for the month including Aperture was 61,213. November was definitely my most productive writing month so far! I looked back at my notes and most months average around 25k. 

My official NaNo chart looks like this!

I'm gonna have a post coming up soon that focuses more on Casanova itself and what I figured out about it over the course of the month. If anybody else did NaNo, I'd love to hear how your November went!

Mid-NaNo Update

My posting schedule worked out so I would actually have a post on the 15th. Too bad I forgot to actually write the post at first ...

NaNo so far hasn't been as easy as it's been the past two years. Like I predicted, it's been a little hard for me to switch gears from Aperture to Casanova, but I've been toughing through it.

I participated in Double Up Day for the first time this year, which was awesome. I wasn't able to donate the past two years, so I'm glad that I was able to pitch in to keep the program going strong and helping out other people. It also helped me get significantly ahead on my word count! I've been keeping up the pace since then and as of last night my average word count per day was about 2k.

This is how my word count bar looked like as of this morning. I haven't written anything yet for today (which is why my daily average is under 2k).

In regards to the writing itself ... I've been making do with what I can come up. Most of what I write by this point is only dialogue. It's been a little hard for me to focus on a plot-driven story when I'm so used to writing a character-driven one, especially when a lot of the plot still isn't decided on yet. It's helped in forcing me make temporary decisions in regards to the plot in order to make word count. 

The dialogue scenes have helped me get a better sense of the characters, too. I write down whatever ends up coming to mind as responses, and all of the characters have developed more than I thought they would have by this point. They still sound a lot like the Aperture characters, but that's always something I can go back and fix in subsequent drafts. 

I actually made it until the 10th before I started writing for Aperture again! I haven't been including any of my Aperture writing in my NaNo word counts, and it's only been <2k so far, but letting myself take a little rest from Casanova has been good. And bad. Usually I want to write for Aperture more than I want to for my NaNo, so I have to force myself to focus, but that's also been good in making myself get it done so I can go back to what I want to work on. 

I didn't write at all on the 13th, which was a little disappointing, but I'm not super heartbroken about it. I had a sleepover with my friend and we went to see the play at our old high school. I think the day off helped me write almost 3k on the 14th. 

I'll come back to this post later and update it with a day-by-day chart of my word counts (and include what I got done today), so please check back! ♥ If any of you are participating in NaNo too, I'd love to hear how you're doing!

Edit: I made the chart I was talking about! It actually includes through the 16th. 

The blue bars are Casanova and the red are Aperture. I've fallen into the habit of focusing on Aperture again, and I'm pretty sure I've lose any lead I've built up from skipping both the 13th and 15th (and writing only 81 words on the 16th), so I'm hoping I can recover from this quickly. 

NaNo Plans 2015

It's that time of year again!! (ﾉᐛ )ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

I got lazy with the design. Don't judge me. 

If you're new here, NaNoWriMo is essentially a challenge to write 50,000 words for a story in the month of November. This is my fourth time attempting it and hopefully my third win! (My first attempt back in 2012 was really half-hearted and I can't even remember which story I worked on for it ...;; )

The past two years I worked on Aperture; in 2013 I wrote 70k as part of Marissa Meyer's NaNo challenge, and in 2014 I wrote just over 50k. I have well over 200,000 words in total for Aperture (this calendar year alone) and I still have no real "novel" to prove for it. This is mainly because of where I draw my inspiration from and the fact that I keep going back and tweaking the plot and creating butterfly effects.

A lot of Aperture's inspiration comes from my life, and because of that, I've hit a metaphorical wall with it recently. I crossed the two a little too closely and I feel like I have to take a step back and re-evaluate a lot of things. (This has happened at least once before, so I'm not too worried about it.)

Because I'm feeling so conflicted about Aperture, I decided to use one of my numerous other story ideas I've been collecting since sophomore year. Back when I started Aperture, I had no idea it would last this long; I had a tendency to start and abandon projects quickly. I grew to love Aperture too much to do that, so I focused solely on it up until senior year.

Even with my focus on Aperture I still hoarded new ideas like they were going out of style. I have about four or five now that I've developed past hypotheticals and actually started writing for. (These line up almost exactly with the Pinterest storyboards I have.) This is a huge accomplishment for me and I'm excited to explore a new world past the couple thousand words I have per said new projects.

So, what am I going to be writing this year?

I decided to work on Casanova this year because it was the idea with the most solid plot at the time. It's a compilation of a couple different plot bunnies I've had, and I'm still working on a lot of the details, but I'm really excited to get this story out.

The basic premise: Toni earns back Carter's soul after it's wrongly taken by a demon known as the Casanova.

So far my writing playlist is all country songs, mainly picked up from when my dad listens to country radio stations while he's working, but I have a feeling I'm going to be adding some Halsey songs in, too. The strongest inspiration songs so far have been "American Kids" and "Cowboy Casanova" (go figure).

Casanova is going to be a challenge for me in a couple different respects, but I'm really looking forward to tackling it. I've got a lot of research and worldbuilding ahead of me since I decided to set the story in Texas and I included a little too much religion in my initial ideas. It's also going to be difficult to switch gears from Aperture to Casanova for an entire month, but I'm also looking forward to it.

So far, it's been really fun to work on preliminary world- and character-building. I've mostly moved out of that phase for Aperture and only started to scratch the surface with all my other ideas. Casanova's been the only one recently where I've had to sit down and anticipate stuff that might come up in the plot that I should know beforehand. I also have a few days' worth of writing from before I decided to use Casanova for NaNo this year.

Keep a lookout on my Casanova Pinterest board and my NaNo stats page! I'm going to be updating both a lot over the course of November, and I'm (hopefully) going to have a mid-NaNo blog post go up around Nov 15th.

Good luck to everyone else participating in NaNo this year! Please feel free to add me as a writing buddy ♥ None of my friends seem to have made plans to do NaNo this year, so I'd love to have company!