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.

Aperture: Hart Family

It's officially been three years since I came up with Quinn!! What did I do with my life before lol I wanted to take today to talk a little bit about her family, which influenced her character design from the beginning. Quinn's family means a lot to both her and the story as a whole, and Aperture wouldn't be the same without them.

I'm also going to talk more about the magical aspect of the characters, since that's something I didn't cover in the post for the quartet. (That may be another post coming up in the future.)

This is really image-heavy, so I'm placing it underneath a cut. Click through for more!

My Writing Process

I was procrastinating last night on both my daily writing and making this post, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I spend a lot of the evening in my room saying that I'm "writing", but what does that actually entail?

Doing anything but writing, basically.

So this is how my night went yesterday.

1. Noticed that the clock said it was after 10pm
2. Decided that it's probably time to start writing
3. Cleared out my inbox instead
          ("cleared" is relative since I still have 700 emails)
4. Noticed the email reminder about my Italian homework and ignored it
5. Checked twitter
6. Finally opened a blank Word document
7. Checked pinterest and facebook instead
8. Opened last night's writing to see if it would give me any better motivation
9. Finally stopped listening to "La Vie Boheme" and switched to Amazon Music
10. Got about 100 words written
11. Checked twitter again
12. Actually tried to focus on writing
13. Got about 700 more words written
14. Decided that I'm tired and that ~800 word was sufficient


So yeah. Not actually all that productive. I managed to finish writing by about 10:50, so this whole thing took less than hour. Which is actually a pretty productive night! Usually I drag it out across a couple hours, but usually the internet is a lot more interesting than it was last night.

Yesterday was also a really long day. My school went into lockdown during my Italian oral exam, like that wasn't stressful enough already. Luckily I already had plans to hang out with friends after class, so after a little miscommunication issues we got to eat some really good food! I think that definitely made up for the stress of the day.

(I also ate way too much yesterday lol)

So far in May I've only written for Aperture so far, but I've been meaning to write for some other projects I have, too. I'm hoping to spend today building up some of the background details I need. I generally need to have a lot of inconsequential info built up about the characters and their world before I feel comfortable writing.

(Maybe I'll make a post about that soon?)

Anyway, I hope this shed some light on what I do when I say I'm writing! I do actually get things done, I promise c:

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. 

What is Aperture?

I talk about Aperture a lot, and I've managed to go almost three years without ever really explaining what it is. (Aperture turns three this year. Holy crap.) Today would be Nate's 19th birthday, so I figured it would be a good day to post something like this.

(If you landed on this page because of a photography-related Google search, sorry. This isn't what you're looking for.)

Short version: Aperture is a story about four kids with magical abilities that get themselves into trouble.

Of course, that doesn't really cover much, so I'm gonna talk a little bit more in depth underneath the cut.

Writing Goals: March / April

I feel like I'm talking about my writing a lot. I think that's a good thing. I hope.

I picked the background thinking, "Oh, it's spring soon." Which means even more thunderstorms like we had yesterday. Thunderstorms in February are surreal. 

I've been doing really well with my writing goals so far this year, and I really want to keep up the momentum.

My January goal was to write at least 500 words every day. In February I added onto it by making at least 100 of those words be towards Casanova. It was a really good move! I'm starting to learn that challenges like NaNo (or even little self-motivated ones like this) are really good at forcing myself to be accountable.

In March, though, I'm considering dropping the Casanova word count goal in order to gear up to do the story for Camp NaNo in April. I'm afraid I might burn myself out by the time Camp NaNo comes by, and I really want to make it a success this year.

I'm hoping that dropping the pressure to write for Casanova every day will force me to do some behind-the-scenes building. I've collected a lot of sticky notes in my school notebooks of things I know I need to work on, but I've never gotten around to actually doing anything. I've had a list of things to research since NaNo that I've never gotten around to.

Of course, there's no way for me to quantitatively track my backstage work, so this plan might not go as well as I'm hoping. And I haven't thought of a plan B yet.

I'm planning to do another 25,000 word goal for this Camp NaNo, which is definitely going to be a challenge based on this month's progress. It's not going to be as insane as NaNo, which will be good, but it's going to require even more motivation. Which is good! I want to make more progress with Casanova than I'm making now.

I'm also going to use the same game plan I used during NaNo -- I'm going to let myself write for more than just Casanova during April, but the other stories don't get to count towards my Camp NaNo progress. Those are extra. This worked really well for me in November and I'm hoping it'll keep me going if I hit roadblocks. (Which is very likely.)

Hopefully by the end of April I'll have something resembling a readable first draft of Casanova! (Well, second draft, I guess.) Right now I'm working towards having a draft that can be read beginning to end, however rough it is. I might need to make a really comprehensive outline between now and the end of March to get there. I don't know.

I'm hoping to make another post about my May / June writing goals as Camp NaNo ends, which I may tack on to a April reflection post. We'll see. Anyway, these next two months should be an adventure. If anyone else is planning on doing Camp NaNo, let me know! I'd love some competition company ♥

Writing Progress: Jan - mid-Feb

Happy Katsucon weekend! 

I had some ideas for posts this weekend, but I didn't get any of them ready in time. Sorry. Instead, I'm going to talk about how my writing has gone the past month and a half or so! I'm really proud of how I've been doing since the new year and I wanted to take some time to show it off ヽ( ᐛ )ノ♪♬

This post is gonna be more about numbers than what I've been focusing on writing. The numbers are what I'm more excited about, tbh

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!

Aperture Quartet

I know that for a while Aperture has been this thing I bring up but explain to the extent of "[vague waving hand motion] it's a thing that exists that I created", and I figured I'd finally change that a little bit! I want to become more comfortable talking about Aperture to people outside of my immediate friend group. (My friends usually hear me talk almost non-stop about Aperture ...)

The day that this goes up will be my final day as a kid -- Wednesday the 12th is my 18th birthday. I figured that was the most auspicious day that I could publish this post. (Or, y'know. To give me something to focus on other than the fact I'll be an adult. I'm still in denial.)

I'm only going to talk about the stuff that's established around the beginning of the book and not any of the stuff that the characters wouldn't tell someone they just met. A pretty big theme of Aperture is secrets and the versions of truth that people tell each other and I don't want to spoil anything!

In making this post, I realized that Quinn and Nate ended up with names similar to the faceclaim actors I found, and I cannot figure out how the heck that happened. Both of my characters are two years old and I only found their faceclaims within the past year.

I tried my best to find the original sources for these photos, and I'm sorry if I miscredit or made a mistake! I actually had to pass up pictures I'd pinned in the past because I couldn't find even a somewhat-credible source for them. (I spent 20 minutes on a picture of Nate that just kept linking back to itself. I still cannot figure out who it was of.)

actress Molly Quinn (image url / original post)

Name: Quinn Hart

Birthdate: 6/21/97

Height: 5'1"

Ethnicity: Irish-American

When I combined the two story ideas that became Aperture, Quinn had a much smaller part than she does now. As I tried to make the two plots mesh together into one coherent one, though, I kept getting ideas that focused on her, and I decided to make her the main character. June 21st is actually the day I came up with her as a character, right after sophomore year ended and I tried to figure out what to do with my summer without internet.

Quinn is the middle child of her family; with four other siblings, she's found the right balance of effort that she doesn't get in trouble for her laziness nor praise for ambition. She's very sarcastic and often tells the truth because she knows nobody will take her seriously. She also decides to ignore problems for as long as possible rather than worry about them, which occasionally backfires on her. 

actor Colin Ford 

(image url / original post)

Name: Nate Collins

Birthdate: 2/28/97

Height: 5'5"

Ethnicity: Israeli / Italian / Greek

I found this picture of Colin Ford on Pinterest through someone's character inspiration board and my jaw just about dropped because holy crap he looks exactly like Nate in this set of promotional pictures. Button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves and all.

Nate's grandparents live next door to Quinn's family. He and his dad lived with his grandparents when he first started school, but they later moved to California when his dad got his footing as a single parent. Nate's dad sends him back to live with his grandparents for reasons Nate refuses to elaborate on. He and Quinn have trouble at first adjusting to seeing each other every day again after losing contact.

actress Katherine McNamara (image url / original post)

Name: Fel Skayhill

Birthdate: 4/4/97

Height: 5'5"

Ethnicity: Canadian French

Fel was the first character I created that still exists in the story, and she was initially supposed to be the narrator for Aperture before I tried a dual POV with both her and Quinn and eventually cutting her POV. Her personality has changed a lot since the first draft I ever wrote.

Fel and her sister were both born in Montreal, but they moved to the US when their parents got jobs with the Smithsonian museums. She and Quinn have been friends since elementary school. Fel is the mom figure of the group and is the one everyone turns to for advice or to make the final decision on anything, which is a position she takes very seriously. She practices rhythmic gymnastics (though she doesn't compete) and is an awesome photographer.

Edit: I initially listed Suki Waterhouse as her faceclaim (image url / original post).

actor Tyler Posey (image url / original post)

Name: Sol Dunst

Birthdate: 10/3/96

Height: 6'1"

Ethnicity: German-Puerto Rican

Before Aperture, Sol was actually a girl! I completely changed Sol's character design so the cast was more balanced. The only thing that stayed the same was the nickname and having a German parent. 

Sol lived with his dad in Germany for a while before he decided to live with his mom and younger brother in the US. Sol and Fel clicked almost immediately when they met in middle school and they've been a steady couple for a few years by the time the story starts. He plays varsity basketball and sometimes struggles with trying to balance three languages between school and home.


So there you go! These four have been what got me through junior and senior year and I can't imagine where I'd be without them. I could probably go on forever with some really sappy story that'd probably bring me to tears trying to type it up (not gonna lie, that's happened more than once ;; ), but I'm gonna leave it here for right now. If you're still curious about Aperture, check out my Pinterest board for it! I'm hoping to write up more posts in the future about the plot and more side characters, but I don't know when I'll get to those or where they'll fit into my post schedule.

Thank you for reading and letting me share my bbs with you!! ♥ 

Camp Nano Results July 2015

Who knows which number Camp NaNo this is I've done. It's like the fourth or fifth by now, I think. One day I should go back and actually count. Camp NaNos are always my favorite to do, since they happen twice as often as November NaNos do and they have flexible word counts.

Drum roll:

I won!!

The last couple days of the bar graph are missing since I wrote this blog post a little early -- we went on a mini vacation the last three days of July and I wanted to make sure I had the blog post written.

I use a monthly calendar from the Washington Post to keep track of what I write each day and how much, so here's what this month actually looked like! The word counts per day are up at the top, the red numbers are cumulative word counts from the beginning of the year, and green are cumulative for the month. 

As of July 27th, I had written 25,083 for the month of July and 175,401 words for the year. My Camp NaNo goal was 25k (as usual) since that's half the word count of a November NaNo. I'm really proud of how I did! 

The past couple Camp NaNos I've said I wanted to work on projects other than Aperture but I rarely actually did. This time I actually started out with a different project! I managed to work on the story I'm co-writing with my friend as well as two ideas that are completely my own, and I got a lot more than I expected. I worked on a total of four different projects, though the majority was still on Aperture. It gave me some pretty good groundwork to continue working on the other four though, since I got a better hold of the voices of each narrator, so I'm exited! 

Also, as a note for how my calendar works: all the words written in black are for Aperture. Words or phrases in parentheses mean they're chapters or scenes that don't have titles yet, but everything else not in parentheses (like Guess Who) means they're named chapters. The non-Aperture projects (Rewrite, Casanova, and Duality project) just had the story names since I don't know if I'm going to use chapter names for them. Those projects are still really young compared to Aperture and don't nearly have as many ideas behind them yet. 

Speaking of Aperture: I'm going to have a blog post specifically about it coming up in the next week or so! That's all I'm gonna mention right now ;) I'm really excited (and a little nervous) about it. Please look forward to it! ♥ 

Camp Nano April 2015 Reflection

I won again this time! Even though I bumped my word count down 5k pretty early on, I still made the 25k mark by the end of the month! ( ᐛ )و

Yeah man, look at all that productivity at the end of the month B)

I reached the 20k mark on the 23rd (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

I didn't get as much written as I wanted to, and all but three days that I wrote were for Aperture, but it's still progress! I got some good ideas going and I decided that the first couple chapters I have of Aperture need re-written in order to be stronger. 

Part of the reason I worked almost exclusively on Aperture was the fact that I'm really stuck in Quinn's narration. Her narration is very close to how I think and speak to make it easier for me to write, but I've been developing her voice over the past year and a half and I find it hard to switch into a different perspective. The stuff I have for Eigengrau is kind of stiff so far, but I just haven't found Hanne's voice yet. 

I also reached the 100k mark for the year on April 30th! It's a little overwhelming to think about how many words I've written that won't make it into the final version of Aperture, but all of them are necessary to develop it in my mind. I often have to write scenes upwards of five times before I find the version that I like and that works seamlessly with the plot. 

Still, I'm super happy with my progress so far ♥ 

Pinterest Story Boards

I've been running so last-minute with these blog posts recently;; I swear I'll catch up again soon!

In the meantime, I decided to share the boards I use on Pinterest! Click on the link at the bottom of each widget to see more, since I learned that clicking on the photos will only bring up that specific pin.

Also, I don't really know if it'll let you see the whole board without an account, so I'm sorry if it tries to cut you off! :c

Follow Joy's board Aperture on Pinterest.
Follow Joy's board Sugar Plum on Pinterest.
Follow Joy's board Casanova on Pinterest.
Follow Joy's board Eigengrau on Pinterest.
Follow Joy's board Rewrite on Pinterest.

I'm not gonna describe any of the plots, since pretty much everything but Aperture is still in a brainstorming phase, but I think most of the boards have details about what I want to do with it! (I think Sugar Plum just has pictures of snow and Eigengrau just has Hanne's hair;; I'm getting there, though!)

Anyway, I hope they're interesting to look through!

Apr 2015 Camp Nano Progress

I do NaNo a lot. I think this is, like, my fourth Camp NaNo or something. Usually it's a good motivator for me. It bothers me to think about running behind, or even worse, ultimately not reaching word count, now that I know I can pull off the full-blown 50k NaNo. The fact that I did that twice and am somehow failing this 20k month is honestly kind of funny. 

NaNo is basically motivation / competition for getting your current novel WIP done. The "traditional" NaNo in November is a set 50,000 words, but Camp NaNo has flexible word counts and mediums (including short story collections, plays, or revisions). It's usually done twice in the warmer months; I wanna say this year it's in July as well. 

This time I decided to give myself a little wiggle room and let myself work on the story that's being published in my school's lit mag as well as the story I've used the previous two NaNos (and however many Camp NaNos). 

It doesn't really help when I'm at a loss for ideas all across the board ... 

My word count is on the left. I initially set my goal to 25k, but I lowered it to 20k after getting back from vacation the first weekend and having almost no words to show for it. 

Camp NaNo lets you do "cabins", which are little groups with forum boards that will track your collective progress. I did a private one with two of my friends, but we've all been suffering from writer's block. I think I'm the only one that's updated their word count since the second day >:|

Writing for my "newer" project Eigengrau helped me catch up. The only writing I have for it is the abandoned first version I based off a dream (and vaguely off a fandom crossover concept) and an assignment I did for my creative writing class that I submitted to our lit mag. It's got a lot of stuff I'm unfamiliar with, including diplomacy and aliens and sign language, but it's been fun so far to work on it. It's a lot different than Aperture. 

I will catch up at some point this month, I swear. I've barely written anything over spring break (which is pretty much over for me now), and I'm kind of mad about that. I'm hoping to get lots of writing done once some of my school obligations are out of the way this week.