amagicbeyond
- Albus Dumbledore
Hi, I'm Karri - I write books and I fangirl.
This blog is for the latter.
Fandoms you'll find here: Starkid, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, BBC Sherlock, Avengers, Supernatural, Glee, Game of Thrones
I collect my Supernatural meta'n'stuff here.
Other places you can connect with me:
my website, facebook, twitter
(again, playing catch-up, this was written from the road)
Project: The Con
Daily Word Goal: 2500
Word Count Today: 4498
Word Count Total: 33311
Finished Chapter: 14
Music: the train, it’s my best friend
Mood: satisfied and weary
Thoughts: Today was my official take-a-train-and-finish-a-novel day, and so I did. I’ve been at it for about four hours, producing 4498 words, dealing with plenty of heightened emotions and bringing Ren’s story to a close.
And it’s even shorter than I thought it would be!
Tomorrow I’ll sketch out a plan of attack for my initial revisions - for example, I need to write at least partial lyrics to several songs for inclusion in various performance scenes - and see how close to 50 000 I can get without compromising the story. There’s no point in padding unnecessarily, but I do feel that there are little bits I could add that could bring more colour and emotional satisfaction to the story and its conclusion.
(Playing catch-up here, these are journals I wrote from the road.)
Project: The Con
Daily Word Goal: 2500
Word Count Today: 700
Word Count Total: 28811
Music: the sounds of a smoky Salzburg cafe
Mood: determined
Thoughts: Short writing day today, just a few hundred words stolen while sipping our drinks and warming up in a cafe. Looking forward to the extended train ride tomorrow, if only to get a rather long stretch of uninterrupted writing time. My goal is to finish the story up, at whatever word count that might be, and then later in the week go back to add the missing bits that I hope will be enough to get me to 50 000. If not, then I’ve got a finished [short] novel draft, even if I can’t call myself a NaNo winner.
No idea why I’m posting this, but here’s the first few paragraphs of my Learning to Dance/ Starship fanfic that I’m writing for NaNo because I’m not a very original person.
Credit to Karri for LtD, and credit to Starkid for Starship.
So I guess this is “fanfic-ception”
Sorry if it sucks :P I started late and just wanted to get words down, so it’s kinda not-that-great.
Background: Up goes away for 2 weeks, and Taz has some serious misadventures while he’s away. (And at the moment he returns and discovers those misadventures, unless I end up changing that).
Takes place AFTER Starship and after LtD, but way before the proposal that was made canon in the “Proposal” ficlet :)
———————————————————————————————————————
Two weeks. Taz didn’t think she could last two weeks without seeing him. A two-week-long training program now that he officially planned on returning to active duty as a commander, to ensure that his robot side was working in perfect harmony with his human half.
Up had only been gone for a few hours, and Taz was already getting restless. She had tried to hang out with Bug and February, but they reminded her too much of Up, of how much she missed him. She refused to talk to Megagirl unless absolutely necessary, she still hated robots for what they had done to Up, so her and Tootsie were out. And she hadn’t seen Specs or Krayonder all day. Even if she had, Taz wasn’t sure she wanted to spend time with either one of them.
So she had retreated to her room, where she lay on her bed for half an hour, staring at the ceiling and reliving her and Up’s goodbye over and over in her head. How he had hugged her tightly, as if they would never see each other again, and she had hugged him back as hard as she could. How they had stared into each other’s eyes, his a bright ocean blue, hers a deep chocolate brown.
How Up had gotten a gleam in his eyes that Taz had once thought she’d never see again, and how he had leaned in, and she had followed suit. Until that perra, Commander Li, who had been waiting to see Up off, had cleared her throat pointedly, causing Up to jump away from Taz. And then he was gone, gone in a drop pod to a planet with similar gravity to Earth’s, for that estúpido training program.
And Taz was lonely.
I love it! And “just getting words down” is what NaNo’s all about!
I would love to read the rest if you decide you want to post it!
Project: The Con
Daily Word Goal: 2500
Word Count Today: 2449
Word Count Total: 28111
Finished Chapter: 11
Music: just the sound of the Vienna-Salzburg train
Mood: Sleepless
Thoughts: I remember now why I failed so utterly at NaNoWriMo last year (I mean, besides the fact that I was writing a story that wasn’t ready to be written). It’s because I was working.
Working by itself is not enough to cause my failure. But add to that Czech class, social commitments and all the little things that come with grown-up life (housework, groceries, cooking, errands, etc) and your day planner starts to fill up rather quickly.
It’s not just finding the time, though. It’s finding the energy.
I’ve accepted a position teaching part-time until Christmas. I had to weigh the options and do a little soul-searching on this one. I could have taken the position until the end of the year, but in the end decided that I had taken this year off for a reason, and I intend to see it through. This decision came along with a new sense of conviction, and a reassessment of my writing goals for this year - more on this in time.
Am I still going to finish NaNoWriMo? You bet I am. I’ve still got twelve days left of November, and I’m closing in on the final few chapters of this story. I think I’ll even have time to go back and add in some missing scenes that will hopefully help tip me over the 50 000 word mark.
I’m taking a few days off as I’m travelling in Austria - but I’ve got a seven-hour train back to Prague Sunday and you know how much I get done on trains!
Project: The Con
Daily Word Goal: 2500
Word Count Today: 2577
Word Count Total: 25660
Finished Chapter: 10
Music: Darren Criss playlist
Mood: Gingerbread latte. That is all.
Thoughts: I wound up taking the weekend off, which wasn’t my intention, but I’ve calculated that if I can still manage 2500 words (approximately a chapter, as it happens) each working weekday until November 30th, I will still make my 50 000 word NaNo goal for this draft. There are two possible roadblocks I foresee here:
1) Teaching - I am working a lot this month, a lot more than I anticipated and that includes a week of full time hours next week. I hope that I will still maintain the energy to knock out my word counts when I get home from work each day of that week, or else I’m going to need to re-evaluate my weekends.
2) Length - Looking at my outline, I calculate that I have about 5-6 chapters left, depending how I play it. That’s about 15 000 words left - or less - and NOT 25 000, which is what I would need to reach the official NaNo goal. Why do my drafts always end up being so freaking short? Not sure yet what I’m going to do about this - I really really really want to be able to call myself an official winner this year but I’m not sure that’s the right kind of justification to add ten thousand words to a draft that I like just fine. I may go back and do a little revision and editing, but I doubt that will grant me the extra ten thou I need. Will continue to chew on this one, and see how I feel once I get to the end of the story.
Continued luck to all still chugging away at NaNo!
Thanks to all who’ve contributed their convention knowledge to add to my growing list of “Con Things” - it’s been a big help in drafting my NaNoWriMo project!
Project: The Con
Daily Word Goal: 2500
Word Count Today: 2591
Word Count Total: 23081
Finished Chapter: 9
Music: Voodoo Child by Rogue Traders (again again again)
Mood: Charged
Thoughts: Set my WriteorDie goals for today at 2500 words in 1 hour and 15 minutes. And did it. Feeling like a boss. Encouraged by the fact that so far I’ve been able to balance this work-and-writing business. Hope I can keep it up. Enjoy some of the directions I went with this chapter, and want to thank everyone who gave me ideas for things that go down at cons (as my own experience is rather limited to LeakyCon 2011). On a related note, today I learned what Caramelldansen is. And so did my protagonist.
Planning to work through the weekend again, to get ahead. Closing in on the halfway mark and it feels good.
Project: The Con
Daily Word Goal: 2500
Word Count Today: 2485
Word Count Total: 20488
Finished Chapter: 8
Music: Voodoo Child by Rogue Traders (again again)
Mood: Businesslike
Thoughts: Feels good to break twenty thousand words.
I think I can manage this routine. Takes me about two hours to write 2500 words, so as long as I can set aside two hours of my mornings to make my word count I should be able to keep this up and make my NaNo goals.
I’m a little concerned about the second-last week of the month, when I’ll be working basically full-time hours substitute teaching, and I know I’ll be very tired when I come home each day. But if I keep writing through the weekends (and maybe try to get a little bit ahead) I might still be able to make it work.
Kudos to all of you who have made the brave and informed decisions not to finish NaNo this year (I think this is generally the time of month it happens, it’s certainly the time of month I had to give up last year). There’s nothing to be ashamed of in this. People have priorities, and if you’re in school and extracurricular activities and have piles of homework and such then I have no idea how you managed to get as far as you did, and I applaud you. But even if you’re not gunning for 50k in a month, I do hope you keep writing when you can!
Happy Thursday.
Project: The Con
Daily Word Goal: 2500
Word Count Today: 2642
Word Count Total: 18001
Finished Chapter: 7
Music: Voodoo Child by Rogue Traders (again)
Mood: Rushed
Thoughts: Today was my first experiment in “Can Karri balance both writing and work at the same time?” The answer, today, was yes, though I was burning the keys at 11:25 this morning, trying to tie up the chapter (and my wordcount) before I had to fly out the door to go to work (yes, it looks like I’m working again - at least for the next six afternoons). Even though I only worked a half day, combined with Czech class this evening I came home pretty tired, so I’m glad I got those words in this morning. I’m going to have to try and keep that up.
And my November just got a lot busier.
