Enjoying the new neighbourhood

While I was writing my novel in November last year I had the chance to go on a few walks in the area where my sister lives, and given they say a picture is worth a thousand words I'll post a few here by way of explaining why I chose to settle here for a while longer.

The first two photos are from the top of a hill at the Torre del Far, a fire and smoke signal tower dating from the 10th century, standing between the villages of Cases de Pène and Tautavel.

Dominating the Corbières, the top offers gorgeous views of several Cathar castles, the Pyrénées mountains, the sea pond of Salses-Leucate, and the Mediterranean sea. The walk is only like 2-3 hours long, and highly recommended. I also walked nearby the Serrabone Priory, another beautiful area with great views of the mountains and all the way to the sea on a nice day.

I've already mentioned my sister's vineyard, it goes without saying the region is known for its wines. The quality of wines and reputation of several small producers in the Roussillon area are steadily growing both in France and internationally. I've really enjoyed walking through the vineyards over winter last year, and hadn't seen so many beautiful rainbows in a very long time. The area tends to get a lot of wind and sunshine, (most) autumn and winter rains don't last long as rain clouds get blown away, and one can see many rainbows in the Roussillon and Fenouillèdes at that time of year.

The Eastern Pyrénées mountains are right there, barely over an hours drive away, to spend a few days there for New Year's Eve 2014 at a friend's place in a lovely little village. We spent a day hiking in snow shoes to the Lac des Bouillouses, pictured above.

A few days after new years eve, I realised I hadn't been to the seaside since I'd arrived in late October. I got on the train from Perpignan for 20 minutes to Collioure, a lovely town on the rocky Côte Vermeille leading to Spain. The town was known as a centre of artistic activity in the early 20th century, with several fauve artists such as André Derain or Henri Matisse making it a regular meeting place. I just spent a few hours walking around and reading on a sunny terrace with a coffee - I had been a few times before and still enjoy it, particularly in low season.

Meanwhile, once I'd finished the NaNoWriMo writing challenge, I spent a lot of time pretty seriously thinking about what I should be doing next and where I should be living. I had a few job interviews for full time roles in Paris and London as well. One interview conversation in particular was extremely useful, challenging, and overall a great support in helping me think things over.

It took me a while (and conversations with friends and family) to realise and admit what was pretty much staring me in the face: I am in amazingly beautiful surroundings, close to my family which was one of the reasons I left Singapore, and close to busy international airports with Gerona and Barcelona next door to get anywhere in the world. I managed to make a living as a consultant while backpacking around Asia, I figure I should be able to do it from here too. I have a little bit of work going already, and will be traveling to London, Paris, Barcelona, Singapore, or wherever needed on a regular basis to meet clients - and keep working on my novel on the side. We'll see how it works out.

Participating in the National Novel Writing Month

The previous posts brought me to the end of October last year, when I arrived near Perpignan, at my sister's vineyard. I have blogged about getting ready for NaNoWriMo, and about leaving Singapore, though I hadn't specified that I've been able to do what I did since thanks to my sister and her partner who invited me to spend time at their place over the winter.

I had a few goals my family and friends have been supporting me in:

1. Writing a novel
2. My drivers license 
3. Ease my transition back to France after 10 years abroad (admin paperwork, etc)
4. Figure out what & where was next.

I'll focus on my experience with NaNoWriMo for this post, which has been a fascinating exercise. 

I've had ambitions to write a novel for a long time, and had set those aside for a long time too. I checked and the most I'd written towards one novel was about 6,000 words, and that was 15 years ago. I'd never written 50,000 words of the same story, which is the NaNoWriMo challenge goal.

I was writing on a regular basis since the month of July with the intention of choosing the main theme and story for the novel I'd be writing in November. I also spent time on writing advice blogs about storytelling, novel structure, characterisation, worldbuilding, etc.

Of course by the time November 1st 2014 arrived, with months of preparation time, set up at my sister's place in the countryside ready to write a novel, I still hadn't chosen what it would be about. As you can see from the graph I didn't add words for the first few days, instead scrambling to get a storyline together from one of the ideas I was toying with. 

The single most common piece of advice from professional writers is that to be a writer, you have to write. Silly yet true. I wasn't really satisfied that I'd chosen the right story to tell, but then I just focused everything on writing for word count. The graph above and the word count were paramount. 

I quickly prepared a storyline and followed it as best I could, other than that I didn't know what I was writing about until I sat down every day and wrote it. The most difficult part was to keep writing regardless of all the considerations going through my mind. 

I didn't know anything about the topic at hand; I'd keep writing. 

I was appalled at how bad my writing was; I'd keep writing.

That piece of dialogue was all wrong; I'd keep writing.

This or that part of the story didn't make sense; I'd keep writing.

You get the drift.

I didn't spend time on the NaNoWriMo support forums and only read the pep talk emails from published authors - which were very encouraging and arrived in my inbox at excellent times throughout the month to keep me on track. Towards the end of November, I admit I was fed up with writing stuff I wasn't satisfied with and not going back to read and improve at all, though I would still recommend participating if you want to write a novel.

I think the main thing I learned and I proved to myself out of the exercise is that I am capable of writing a novel, or at the very least the amount of words to make up a novel. I'm proud I completed the challenge successfully and have a first draft to a novel, more than I'd ever completed before. It is definitely a very ugly duckling of a first draft, but one nonetheless. 

On the downside, I took 6 months to reread what I wrote. At first I had a hard time being with how bad it was and got busy with other things. I only finished it this month. It is all wrong and pretty bad, but I'm happy there are some worthwhile ideas and passages, particularly in the second half of the book. I'm going to keep working on it now.

Word count training challenge

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson

This is something I hadn't thought about for a little while and hadn't given much energy or intention to in years either; one of my dreams in life is write a novel. I spent a while reading some advice for writing and there seems to be a general consensus that the best way to become a writer is to actually write.

I was probably hoping my novel would just be delivered at the door by Amazon, or at least that some nefarious supernatural being might show up and offer me a Faustian deal, but neither of those seem to be happening so I might just have to do the work myself.

Given my slob-like tendencies, I have been lazy with my writing - how often I update my blog being a case in point (and/or I can also be too busy with other important stuff like watching TV shows or making/drinking beer), I'm putting together a training regime and making some commitments about how much I'll be writing. And I'm telling people as well as writing it in my blog so I don't laze out of it and even if I happen to slip, this way I'll have friends reminding me by asking how I'm doing with my writing projects.



This takes us to NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which happens in November. For those who haven't heard of it, it first started as a community initiative to encourage more people to practice creative writing and a group of people supporting each other with their writing projects. Now it is also a non profit organisation and they have several creative writing initiatives in addition to NaNoWriMo

The main goal is pretty straightforward: write a 50,000 word 'novel' between the 1st to the 30th of November. I added quotes to novel given I understand the main goal to be quantity rather than quality, nobody checks what you write, it's all about the word count to practice writing in quantity. Apparently the 50k goal represents about a small novel like The Great Gatsby and is theoretically possible to achieve while also having a full time job.

According to the website 341,375 people participated in 2012 from all around the globe, it has become quite popular. I first heard about NaNoWriMo at a Barcamp in London a few years ago, someone told us about their experience of participating and spending way too much time with the support groups, and nowhere near enough time actually writing.

There are also quite a few people with divided opinions about NaNoWriMo, but the way I see it, I need to get up to speed and force myself to train to up my word count, once I'm more comfortable with that, then I can worry about quality and re-writing something to get a finished novel. This reminded me of a story, apparently first published in a book called Art & Fear and I've seen several mentions of since, but I haven't identified the actual source, so while I like the story I'm not totally certain it is true.

In short, it is the story of a ceramics teacher who split his classroom in two as an experiment, telling one half they would all be graded on quantity: the more pots they did, the better grade they would get. He told the second half they would be judged on quality: one clay pot would be sufficient to get a top grade, as long as it was perfect.

You can already imagine the results: the pots of the quantity group were if a higher quality standard than the second group because they had a lot more practice and given they didn't worry about quality, ended up learning more from their mistakes as they went. The quality group spent a lot of time pondering about the meaning of perfection but didn't get any better at pottery (Whether they got better as philosophers, the story doesn't say).

I see participating in NaNoWriMo the same way, and I'm setting a training regime I'd like to share with you.

Writing 50,000 words of a new novel or story in November 2014 means writing an average of 1,667 words per day. I'm nowhere near that kind of volume so I'll start with getting up to speed first.

I'm setting myself a few rules:

1. I'll measure my daily word count and tally weekly and monthly numbers
2. This is what can go towards my daily word count:
• Writing about myself, my life, my travels, in a biography or journal style - this is to warm up as it were, apparently writing about what you know is a recurring piece of advice and I imagine if I get stuck with a story, writing about myself would be easier to make my word count in the beginning
• Writing for a novel or short story
• Writing a blog post
• Posts or articles I might write for other publications
3. I can postpone word count for a day or a few, as long as I'm up to date by the end of each week (if I don't do that it's a fail and I'll work out how to catch up in the following week)

From today to the Sunday 16th August I commit to writing at least 500 words per day (3,500 / week) and up to 100% in biography style.

From 17th August 2014 to 13th September I'll increase to 1,000 / day (7,000 words / week) and up to 50% in biography style - this is so I start forcing myself to write more fiction stories.

From 14th September 2014 to 18th October  I'll increase to 1,500 / day (10,500 words / week) and up to 50% in biography style.

From 19th October to 31st October I commit to writing at least 1,800 / day (12,600 words per week) and up to 25% in biography style.

Then on the 1st of November I will begin a new novel for NaNoWriMo, meaning I'll write an average of 1,667 words per day and an overall goal of 50,000 until 30th November.

I'll re-evaluate how things are going and wether I need any more or different rules. After November, I'll evaluate how well I've done and what the next phase should be about in the overall novel writing project.

If you see me, or contact me, please don't hesitate asking how I'm doing with the writing challenge!

PS: By my own rules, this blog post counts against my daily writing, adding 1,095 words to my daily word count!

PPS: I realise after publishing that my word count for NaNoWriMo naïvely divides the 50k by goal by the number of days and that even to write a completely unfinished pile of crap it might still require more than 1,667 words written per day. I will revise this in a few weeks, seeing how the training goes.