Adjusting Expectations

“There are two ways to get enough,” Chesterton once wrote. “One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” It is this adjustment of expectations that I would like to consider in this post.

One of my hobbies is fencing (epee primarily, but I dabble in foil occasionally, and sabre very rarely). Now, I don’t tend to fence in competitions very much, but obviously even in club matches you are attempting to win. You’re trying to improve your own abilities and develop as a fencer, but basically you’re trying to stab the other person more times than they stab you.

You start the fight determined to win. It often happens that you begin to fence, and find that you’re falling rapidly behind. Your attacks are slow, obvious and poorly executed. You find yourself obligingly moving your blade out of their way and stumbling onto their point with all the combative grace of a blindfolded, bow-legged ostrich. “Very well,” you say to yourself, “I’m obviously not going to win, but I’ll at least get twelve points before he gets his fifteen.”

Time passes and more hits are landed (by him). “Okay then,” you concede, “but I’ll at least get to ten.”

“Fine, five.”

“Three surely?”

“He may win, but I’m at least going to score once! I shall not allow this to be a complete whitewash!”

“Oh. Bother.”

All of this is really just an elaborate preamble to my main topic. In my last post, I declared my intention to participate in the National Novel Writing Month. I am pleased that I can already report my success. I have indeed participated.

Unfortunately, what I am not going to do, alas, is win.

The primary reason for this is that our landlord spontaneously decided (having, no doubt, read my blog) that they wanted to terminate our tenancy. Cue frantic house searching, followed, in the last two or three weeks, with packing. This has seriously cut into my writing time, and even when I have had time, I’ve been rather too tired. Added to this, we spent a few days at my parents’, and although I took a laptop and a host of good intentions with me, I actually got very little done.

I am now very far behind, with little chance of catching up before the deadline of the 30^th of November. Very well then, instead of accumulating more and more, I shall desire less. By that, I don’t mean that I shall consider an achievable twenty five thousand words a win. Rather, I am determined to do something I’ve never achieved before, and actually update my word count every single day. I’ve completed Nano numerous times, but I’ve never once managed to get through the entire month consistently adding words each day.

It will probably never actually be the standard 1667 words that would be required to win under normal circumstances. In fact, one day it was only twenty six words, but I am determined to achieve this small goal. I shall adjust my expectations.

And at the end of the month, although I won’t have hit the target, I shall have twenty or thirty thousand words that I didn’t have at the start, and that’s considerably better than nothing.

Here We Go Again...

Yep, it’s October. That means that, unless something goes badly wrong, it will be November next month, and we all know what that means. National Novel Writing Month! I will once again be endeavouring to pump out 50,000 words of original fiction between the 1^st and 30^th of November, along with tens of thousands of others around the globe.

This year sees me return to Edmund Zenith of the Royal Air Fleet, protagonist of 2015’s successful NaNo attempt ‘Squadron’s Zenith. I posted before about the fact that I apparently started the series with the second book, and that I would need to go back and cover Zenith’s lieutenancy, prior to the promotion that put him in command of the HMA Hippolyta.

This year, I will be working on what should be (probably) the first book in the series, Ship’s Zenith. I will confess straightaway that according to the NaNo rules, I will be cheating slightly. I say this because I have actually already started work on Ship’s Zenith; although I’ve only produced 7,000 words or so. I will be producing 50,000 more words, but nonetheless, strictly speaking it’s supposed to be a completely new novel.

I do wonder whether I couldn’t start even further back in the timeline, with my main character as a very young midshipman, and call the book ‘Wardroom’s Zenith’. However, it’s already been established that Zenith was a Lieutenant on-board the Pendragon. If I do go further back and write Wardroom’s Zenith, it will have to be a totally new story again. Currently, I have no ideas for it, but we’ll see.

For now, here’s the blurb for Ship’s Zenith as it currently appears on the NaNoWriMo website:

“It’s 1876, and Edmund Zenith, a young lieutenant in the Royal Air Fleet, is posted to the Pendragon, a magnificent airship of the line. However, between a tyrannical captain, pirates, irritable Frenchmen, deserts, sandstorms and a nosy newspaperman, what should be a dream posting may prove far more than the inexperienced young officer can handle!”

That’s the plan at least. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Glorious Victory (2016 edition)

I am pleased to report that I have once again successfully completed the Nation Novel Writing Month, having written 50,000 words over the course of November.  Hurrah for me!

I have to say though, that I have not been as satisfied with this year’s effort as last year’s.  I was aware, even while I was writing that some of it was just filler to make up the word count while I tried to figure out exactly where to go next, and that it would be sliced out during the editing process.  This isn’t necessarily discouraged by NaNoWriMo, who cheerfully accept all sorts of nefarious word-generating ploys, and insist on the total primacy of quantity over quality when it comes to the first draft, but as someone who (arrogantly perhaps) actually believes that I’m a fairly good writer, it irked me.

There was much about the story that didn’t quite sit right.  The main character was supposed to be an authoritarian commander turned ruthless crime boss, but I struggled to make him quite as ruthless as perhaps he should have been simply because it would have also made him a rather unlikeable character.  As it was, he extorted money without a qualm, and took over a brothel without raising a hair, his only stipulation being that none of his men be sold a certain addictive narcotic.  Drunkenness, gambling, prostitution and extortion though were all accepted, and I found even this troubling.  The character needed to become a successful crime boss, and this requires committing and profiting from crimes, and I didn’t want him to become a Robin Hood-esque ‘good’ criminal but a genuine mobster, whilst keeping him relatively sympathetic and relatable.  The idea was that, later on he would take up the cause of the poor against the decadent rich, but only after having established himself as a genuine power within the criminal hinterland, not as a long-term altruistic goal to which crime was merely a means.  I certainly didn’t get that far within the 50,000 words; he’s still establishing and expanding his criminal empire, although see above regarding edit-worthy filler.

There were several times during the month when I wished I’d gone with the other option of working on my Zenith series.  Edmund Zenith at least has no intention of becoming a ruthless crime boss, but then he also hasn’t been betrayed by the country he serves (yet!), and he was certainly an easier character to pin down, in terms of personality.  With General Lucas, I found it hard to remain consistent.  He was supposed to be honourable but fairly ruthless, careful of his men and their wellbeing, but more for the sake of efficiency than benevolence, strict but not hidebound, and I found it hard to stick to this, or at least get it across in the writing.

Still, I succeeded in completing the word count, and I now have a (very) rough shape hewn out of the rock which I can build upon and refine later, although I suspect that for the near future I will return to Edmund Zenith and his rather more dashing world of airships and Imperial intrigue, and leave Guil Lucas in his muddy, violent slum for a while to brew and mature.