NaNoWriMo Take 2

I'm participating in NaNoWriMo again, the thirty day feels-like-a-constant-hangover event where you try and knock out a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, but this year I'm doing it a bit differently. I spent November 2012 pounding keys and reached the 50,000 word target, leaving me with a book that was very rushed and needed a ton of work doing to it (gibberish taken out, and descriptions and grammar put in) but I've found it a real struggle to sit down and edit. I always prefer writing new things to tidying up my old work anyway, and with such a mammoth task I just keep putting it off, overawed at the size of the mountain in front of me. To put it into context, when I write a 3000 word story I will usually end up reading through it and editing it about twenty times or more, so multiply that over the size of a novel and it leaves me wondering how anyone in the history of the world has ever completed a book before.

I found NaNoWriMo a really good motivator, mostly because you get a little graph that shows your progress throughout the month, so I thought why not use it to help me edit this year. For every hour I spend on my novel I'm giving myself a thousand words to my total, in the hope that come the end of November I'll have managed to spend fifty hours on it, and then I can keep doing the same in the months following. So far, halfway through the month I'm a bit behind, and have only given myself eighteen hours, but that's a hell of a lot better than last month, when I would have given myself zero hours, should I have been keeping count. Even though now I've got into it the task seems even bigger than when I started, with that little graph helping me tick along editing my novel doesn't seem quite so daunting. I've managed to get back from hiding my manuscript in a drawer to spreading it all over my desk and constantly thinking of how it can be improved.

All I've done in eighteen hours work is read through the first of six parts and make a load of changes and notes (admittedly it is the longest part, so that's probably a third of the whole story). I've then split that part into eleven chapters and I've edited the first two. I should have a novel completed some time after I die of very old age.

If you'd like to you can follow my progress here: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/adam_bowman/novels

Loch Ness Fun

I'd love to be out in the middle of Loch Ness in the dead of night, sat alone in a rickety wooden rowing boat, hearing pins drop all around, just waiting for the monster to appear. Surely even the biggest skeptic would be absolutely terrified.

Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

I’ve recently got into running, and after the initial pain and suffering, have managed to break through a barrier and really enjoy it. I find myself some days at work looking out the window and longing to be out tramping the roads, huffing and puffing my way to ever-increasing distances. To begin with, I was just desperately trying to regulate my breath, feeling every pound of my feet as I struggled to keep going as long as I could, but now I’ve reached a miraculous level of zen when I’m running, so I can almost even forget that I’m doing it, my mind wanders and I can plod along almost meditatively. Since I got that feeling I’ve been desperate to replicate it, and running has become a drug to me. I’ve been going out three or four times a week and it has become routine.

I wish I could say the same about writing, but at the moment I’m struggling to get anything done. Since we moved house I’ve been so busy, and the room I’ve made my study is currently full of stuff as we decorate our bedroom. I know that, like running, when I start writing, make a nightly habit of it, I’ll get that druggy buzz again and want to be doing it all the time, but it’s just getting in the room, sitting at the desk, starting, that so difficult. Last year I found taking part in NaNoWriMo really helpful in spurring me to do a ton of writing, so I might try and keep to the schedule again this year, except this time instead of writing 2000 words a night I’ll be editing 2000 words. Making time is hard when you’re settling into a new home and job, but I just need that first step onto a country road, that first injection, and I’ll be back feverishly editing my novel.

A Little Tone Shift Goes A Long Way

Some prankster posted this silly, yet ingenious, video on Youtube; it's a trailer for slapstick Robin Williams cross-dressing comedy Mrs Doubtfire, sinisterly recut as a psychological thriller. Mrs Doubtfire could never be accused of being serious or dark in any way, but with careful editing and some dramatic/ scary music and heavy breathing on the soundtrack, the film appears 100% different to the finished product. It adds yet another string to Mrs Doubtfire's bow as the greatest film of the 90s.

It's amazing how little you have to do to completely shift an audience's perception of something, and shows how important it is to strike the right tone to get your message across. There are tons of little things that might affect somebody's reading of literature, from what they've read in the past to their own life experiences, and you can never truly know how anybody is going to take an idea or plot. I've written stories and people have completely missed the point I was trying to make, or reached an entirely separate conclusion. Mostly this has been my fault because I thought things were obvious when they weren't, since the story in my head is so much bigger than the words that make it onto the page. It's hard to put yourself in a reader's shoes, coming at the story fresh rather than having read it fifty times and edited it to death, to put the right number of clues in to make your meaning clear, but not overdo it and spoonfeed your message. Writing is difficult!

Inside Dehli's Magician's Ghetto

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie refers to Delhi's magician's quarter, a fabulous place in which fire-eaters, snake charmers, fakirs, contortionists, jugglers, and fortune tellers live in a presumably Harry Potter like reality, with spells crashing through the air, an endless stream of juggled objects being hurled around and kept off the ground by thousands of people, and inhabitants whizzing around on magic carpets. I just assumed it was a wonderfully unrealistic creation of the author, until I looked it up and found that it was the real deal: there genuinely is a slum section of Dehli in which the city's various conjurors congregate to live in crudely raised shacks. From there, they can draw in passing tourists with their displays and scrape a living, or venture out to entertainer jobs in wealthier areas.

It's probably pretty far from the fantastical version of my mind, a 24-hour circus where the fun never stops, where a succession of wild and crazy performers jostle for the attention of any passing tourist, diving in front of the camera to perform their wondrous feats before being jostled aside and having their place taken by another magician, but just the idea of an area in which all the city's entertainers live together is enough to make the world sound a jolly place. Perhaps it's a good juxtaposition between the fantasy of a perfect world and the true world we live in when the actual place is nothing like the dream, but is instead like any other slum, in which people are crammed together under leaky tarpaulins, half-starved, but just happen to be professional conjurers. The most up-to-date article I could find on the Magician's Ghetto suggests that in 2010 India were looking to bulldoze it to the ground to tidy the area in time for the upcoming Commonwealth Games. After this article the trail runs cold, so hopefully it never came to pass and the Magician's Ghetto lives on.

The Cooping of Edgar Allan Poe

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering dazed around the streets of downtown Baltimore, wearing clothes that didn't belong to him (perhaps a fetching bikini/ sarong combo). Poe was taken to hospital and four days later he was dead. With all medical records lost, and the author incoherent until his death, it was unclear how he went missing in the first place, how he turned up wearing a stranger's clothes, even what caused his death, until a conspiracy theory emerged, maybe a figment of imagination, or maybe a sinister truth of America's shady past.

The theory was that Poe was a victim of cooping, an old-school form of election fraud in which shady government characters would employ heavies (in nineteenth century Baltimore maybe a time-travelling Stringer Bell) to kidnap people from the streets, keep them bunged in cages, and ferry them around to different voting wards to rack up multiple votes for the same candidate. As fitting a fate as this sounds to befall a great eccentric such as Poe, it seems a strange way to get extra votes in a country that at the time was so corrupt that senators could trawl library records and pull the details of dead men for some extra support. And if you were going to coop somebody, you might not choose someone of such a ghoulishly terrifying appearance as Poe. It's not said whether he had his trademark moustache when he was found. In the theory's defence, there's no rational explanation for Poe going missing and turning up in borrowed clothes, other than that he may have been kidnapped and forced to perform nightly strips in Baltimore's gentlemen's clubs alongside a host of other moustachioed beauties, and after a few days, worn out, he was slipped into the nearest outfit and dropped on the streets.

Whether the cooping story is true or not, whenever I think of Poe I have the image of a scary wide-eyed horror writer locked in a cage and wearing a giant fake beak, fluffy downage glued all over his body. It makes The Tell-Tale Heart less scary if you imagine it being written by a giant man-chicken.

A Game of Thrones: Page-Turning and Mind-Boggling

Game of Thrones is probably the best thing I've ever seen on tv. Dragons and magic and political intrigue and mountain men called Shagga make it ridiculously exciting and imaginative, and the grey lines between good and evil that nearly all the characters operate on has left me rooting for everybody in the series, even those trying to kill each other. One thing I never thought I'd do though, was read A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of books that inspired the show. By the time I'd watched the first episode, five sumo-sized books had already been released, and with a couple more still due I decided that rather than dedicating a year of my reading time to George R. R. Martin I'd just watch the tv show and forget the books. I can't give up that much time to reading a fantasy series that might go on forever, or be left unfinished when its ageing, overweight author pegs it, when there are so many wonderful books out there that haven't been turned into tv programmes.

This all changed when I rewatched the first two seasons of Game of Thrones in anticipation of the third season starting in May, but unfortunately watched them too quickly and left myself with a week gap of shaking excitement before I could watch anything new. At this point I was consumed by Game of Thrones, desperate to immerse myself in its world, to find out any tiny detail the tv show might have missed, and horribly unable to use Google for more information for fear of spoilers. So I had to read the first book, titled A Game of Thrones to confuse people. I've never been so excited to read something in which I knew every single thing that was going to happen. It truly is a remarkable book. I've spoken before, when I was reading the Hunger Games trilogy, of the problem with a page-turner being that they're usually light on detail or thought-provoking passages, but Martin seems to mix the two, page-turning and thought-provoking, into a delicious cake that he's been gorging on for the last twenty years, since he began the series.

The depth in A Game of Thrones is staggering: tiny details are dropped only to became major plot points a few hundred pages later, insignificant characters are carefully given back-stories that may or may not emerge in later novels, and there's even a whole recent history to the events of the novel, that is only summarised but would make a great story in itself. It's amazing to immerse yourself in what at times seems like an alternative history to the world (but with dragons). It's huge, and brilliant, and if you like the tv show and are thirsting for tiny little extras you really should give it a go. And if you haven't seen the tv show then you're a damn fool.