NaNoWriMo – Ecce Signum

Weekly Round-up, December 9, 2023

2023-12-092023-12-09 John Winkelman

Hello. This is me trying to get back into the habit of weekly blog posts about goings-on in my life. We will see how long it lasts, and how my intentions endure the slings and arrows of *gestures at everything*.

***

I have been thinking about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, and also about Frank Wilhoit’s quote about capitalism.

Ashby’s law states, more or less, that in any control system, the control apparatus must be able to account for (e.g. be as complex as) all possible variants in the system being controlled.

Wilhoit’s quote is as follows: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

There is some resonance between these ideas which I have been exploring in my (almost non-existent) downtime, and I will post updates to these thoughts as they crystalize.

***

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, and I have logged my eighth win out of eleven attempts, I feel like I have the energy to continue writing. In past years that has not been the case for many and varied reasons, but this year, though I am well into my mid fifties, I have energy reserves which were simply not there in years past. So I will take advantage of that.

Writing, be it creative, work-related, keeping a journal, or blogging, is a habit which requires practice and maintenance. And when pulling out of a slump, there are two parts to restarting the practice: getting out of the habit of not doing the thing, and getting into the habit of doing the thing.

***

Currently reading: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Fields of Castile by Antonio Machado, Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

***

The writing prompt for the past week was:

Subject: Undead, Addiction
Setting: Ship
Genre: Magic Realism

I didn’t do much with this one, other than to come up with a few interesting scenarios during my walks to and from work.

The writing prompt for the next week is:

Subject: Addiction, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Border Town
Genre: War

***

Random links for the week:

Literary Fight Club: On the Great Poets’ Brawl of ‘68 (LitHub) – This would have been a fun party to attend.
Gulag Archipelago: Fifty Years After The ‘Bomb’ That Exploded Lies Of Soviet Rule, Solzhenitsyn’s Son Recalls Book’s Impact (Radio Free Europe) – I haven’t yet got far in The Gulag Archipelago, but I did read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and it has stuck with me for over 30 years.
The Bond villain compliance strategy (Bits About Money) – This is why financial crimes should be treated as violent crimes. De facto, the wealthier the criminal, the more severe the punishment should be.
The Etymologies of Capital, Capitalist, and Capitalism: A Brief Sketch (Naked Capitalism) – I like that “capitalist” and “decapitate” share the same etymological roots
Pressley, Welch introduce legislation to guarantee right to vote for people with felonies on record (Associated Press) – I’m all for this. All citizens should be allowed to vote in any election in any district of which they are constituents. This right must not be limited in any way. Not by photo ID requirements (which is to say, poll tax), gerrymandering, limited access to voting locations, limited location hours, or any of the other ridiculous barriers to democracy which conservatives have put in place, and continue to put in place, for decades. Even the slightest limit or restriction on the voting rights of any American citizen is nothing less than full-on, deliberate fascism.
Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction (LitHub) – The simple answer is, of course, that the cruelty is the point. When it comes to book bans in prisons the goal, like banning books in schools and universities, is to create an under-educated underclass in a state of permanent precarity. This plus the decades and centuries of purposefully and openly racist carceral policies in the USA demonstrate that the American version of conservatism is nothing more than aristocracy and feudalism with the serial numbers filed off.
Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (Cory Doctorow) – Exactly what it says on the tin.

NaNoWriMo 2023 In Review

2023-11-302023-11-30 John Winkelman

Poe, worn out from being Poe

I am happy to report that, for the eighth time since I first participated in National Novel Writing Month back in 2013, I have reached (and passed) my goal of 50,000 words. So, yay me!

This year I did something new. Instead of working on a novel or collections of short stories, I started a project called “Fifty Flashes and Fragments,” with the goal of writing fifty flash fictions or fragments of stories over the course of the month.

I hit 50,000 words on November 27 with piece 39, and then wrote one more because “Forty Flashes and Fragments” flows better as a project title. About half of the pieces have some merit, and of those, maybe half a dozen are genuinely good.

In service of this project, I created on this website a simple prompt generator which produces, at the click of a button, two subjects, a setting, and a genre. The only rule I set myself was that I had to use the prompt generated. Or rather, what I would NOT do is click the generator until I found a combination of subjects, setting, and genre that I liked. I only broke that rule once, when the generator produced a duplicate of the previous prompt. Random numbers are funny that way.

This method worked wonderfully, and I plan to continue to use the generator (with some modifications of the subject, setting, and genre options) for weekly writing exercises.

For NaNoWriMo 2021 and 2022, I came up with a new method of tracking my writing which focused more on the day-to-day nature of NaNo and less on things like chapters, scenes, and so forth. In those years I created one document for each day of the month, and when I started writing for a new day, even if I was still in the middle of a chapter or scene from the day before, I put that writing in the new document.

Psychologically, this had the benefit of breaking me out of the mindset of “I need to finish this chapter before I go to bed” or “I don’t want to start this chapter/scene/etc. until I have time to complete it in one writing session.” That kind of thinking is, to me, less valuable during the month of November. November is for writing 50,000 words. December is for editing those 50,000 words. Or not.

I feel that my 2023 NaNo project is a natural outgrowth of the method I used in the previous two years, and I recommend it to anyone who feels trapped between the demands of the story they are writing, and the demands of NaNoWriMo.

As always, I want to thank the members of NaNoWriMo Grand Rapids for their help, community, and support.

Here is the complete list of prompts I used for NaNoWriMo 2023.

Index: Subject 1, Subject 2; Setting; Genre

01: Economics, Aliens; Subterranean; Science Fiction
02: Revenge, Empire; Ship; Technothriller
03: Dragons, Evolution; Ship; Biopunk
04: Cyborgs, Possession; Small Town; Mystery
05: Super Powers, Portals; Battlefield; Solarpunk
06: Super Powers, Kaiju; Urban; Adventure
07: Cryptids, Music; Boardroom; Utopian
08: Cyborgs, Portals; Outpost; Literary Fiction
09: Evolution, Economics; Virtual Reality; Steampunk
10: Spiritual Beings, Super Powers; Lost City; Spy
11: Aliens, Cyborgs; Library; Noir
12: Apocalypse, Precursors; Labyrinth; Dystopian
13: Aliens, Dragons; Ruins; Western
14: Addiction, Language; Urban; Literary Fiction
15: Dreams, Espionage; Ocean; Western
16: Empire, Death; Lost City; Adventure
17: Possession, Dragons; Bar; Horror
18: Portals, Dragons; Battlefield; Biopunk
19: Kaiju, Language; Wasteland; Horror
20: Portals, Revenge; Labyrinth; Folk Tale
21: Music, Cyborgs; Ocean; Magic Realism
22: Robots, Revenge; Ship; War
23: Dreams, Fae; Subterranean; Cyberpunk
24: Colonization, Cryptids; Wasteland; Solarpunk
25: Music, Super Powers; Lost City; Steampunk
26: Genius Loci, Reincarnation; Battlefield; Weird Fiction
27: Portals, Espionage; Library; Weird Fiction
28: Revenge, Artificial Intelligence; Wilderness; Solarpunk
29: Language, Spiritual Beings; Space; Noir
30: Super Powers, Cryptids; Ocean; Utopia
31: Portals, Kaiju; Labyrinth; Horror
32: Politics, Dragons; Wasteland; Romance
33: Addiction, Spiritual Beings; Wilderness; Spy
34: Aliens, Music; Ship; Literary Fiction
35: Espionage, Robots; Boardroom; Western
36: Relic, Apocalypse; Space; Science Fiction
37: Fae, Politics; Small Town; Literary Fiction
38: Revenge, Mutants; Academia; Procedural
39: Mutants, Environment; Bordertown; Utopian
40: Portals, Colonization; Wilderness; Utopian

IWSG, November 2023: NaNoWriMo, Y’All!

2023-11-012023-10-31 John Winkelman

Poe, helping us make the bed

Life is crazy busy, so this will be a short post.

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for November 2023 is:

November is National Novel Writing Month. Have you ever participated? If not, why not?

Yes I have! This will be my eleventh year, and this year I am switching things up by attempting fifty (50!) flash fictions in the month of November. To aid that quest, I created a simple prompt generator which you can play with here. It produces random combinations of subject, setting and genre. Here are some examples:

Subject: Espionage, Empire
Setting: Virtual Reality
Genre: Horror

Subject: Revenge, Environment
Setting: Outpost
Genre: Western

Subject: Precursors, Dreams
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Cyberpunk

The only rule I am holding myself to is that when I generate a prompt, I have to use that prompt. Generating prompts until I find one I like is not allowed.

My user name on nanowrimo.org is JohnFromGR, so feel free to send me a buddy request.

Happy NaNoWriMo, everyone!

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, August, 2023: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

2023-08-022023-08-02 John Winkelman

Poe, looking out over her domain.

(Poe, surveying her domain, which is everything.)

Oh, what a month was July. There have been hotter summers here in Grand Rapids, and there have been more humid summers, but I don’t remember a summer when it was so unpleasant to be outdoors for so much of the time.

I imagine the perpetual smoke from the Canadian wildfires might have something to do with it. But there are up-sides. As Ray Barboni said in Get Shorty, “They the f*cking smog is the f*cking reason you have such beautiful f*cking sunsets.”

Last weekend, for the first time since well before the COVID lockdowns, I attended a writer’s group. It was…wonderful! And now I have a plan for what I am going to work on for the rest of the year.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for August 2023 is: Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it?

Occasionally. Less so now than in the earlier days of my writing, simply because I have had more practice and am more likely to spot problematic passages and ideas earlier in the process. But sometimes something slips past and makes it into a later draft.

Then there are projects like my first NaNoWriMo story, back in 2013. It was a technothriller set about fifty years from now in Gabon. I chose Gabon purely for geologic and climate reason, with no thought given to the history and culture of Gabon and Libreville, Gabon’s capital city. There isn’t much information on the culture of Gabon right now, and was much less 12 years ago. So while I still think the bones of the story are good, if I want to complete it for publishing I will need to seriously rework every character, as well as my assumptions about what Gabonaise culture will look like in 2075.

A more mundane example: For my 2018 NaNoWriMo story (NaNoWriMo again!) I wrote a book which was basically a transcript of multiple interactions with a terrible neighbor, rearranged and with a wish-fulfilling ending tacked on. I used everyone’s real names, so if I do try for publication, I will need to make some changes. I do this not to protect the innocent, or preserve privacy, but because, in the extremely unlikely event that the neighbor in question reads the book, I don’t want to get sued. So perhaps this isn’t something I feel conflicted about so much as a timely application of enlightened self-interest.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, December 2022: Holiday Writing

2022-12-072022-12-07 John Winkelman

Poe hiding from loud noises.

[EDIT – didn’t actually write the post before its scheduled publication time. That has been corrected.]

The past several weeks have been busy, thanks to NaNoWriMo, work, family obligations, and planning house upgrades. Thus a short IWSG post for the month.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for December 2022 is: It’s holiday time! Are the holidays a time to catch up or fall behind on writer goals?

In past years I would have said holidays are when I fall behind, even though I have vacation time, but this year I think I might put that down time to good use. This is mostly because I have an actual plan and an actual draft to work on, with an actual end goal in sight. This is seldom the case at the end of the year. That, more than anything else, tends to drive whether or not I actually sit down and do the work.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

NaNoWriMo 2022 Wrap-up

2022-12-022022-12-02 John Winkelman

Poe in Repose

Well, NaNoWriMo 2022 is over, and I can chalk up another win for myself. I hit 50,000 words in my WIP Cacophonous on November 23, and managed to get in a couple thousand more before the end of the month. I had hoped to hit 60k but family and holiday stuff, as well as a strong attack of burnout from the year, sapped all of my creative energy. But still – 50,000 words in a little over three weeks. I’ll accept that.

This year I employed the same strategy as last year – one document for every day of the month, word count in the title, and let the chapter breaks fall where they may. As with last year, this had two benefits. First, it removed the sense that the next chapter couldn’t start until the previous one was finished. I didn’t have to finish scene X by the end of the day. I could pick it up the next morning. This is really more of a psychological than a practical trick. but it does keep the focus where it should be for NaNoWriMo – productivity and word count. The editing happens later. This is Draft 0. After it is all cobbled together, it is draft 1. Then the editing can begin. And second, I could start each day fresh, unencumbered by what I had worked on in the previous sessions.

The big change this year, from the past three, was the community involvement. Of course 2020 and 2021 had no in-person events, and 2019 I think I skipped out on everything so I could be with my partner as she had recently moved in and things around the house were still a little chaotic.

I didn’t realize how much I had missed the community aspect of NaNoWriMo until I walked in the room for the kickoff party back at the end of October and saw all of those familiar faces, some of whom I had not seen in five years. Then there was a book launch party for the first publications by Lakeshore Literary, the new publishing endeavor which grew out of the ashes of Caffeinated Press. And then two weeks ago we had DoKN, or the Day of Knockout Noveling, where I wrote about 5,000 words in one afternoon, ate a lot of really good food, and encountered many more of the people who I had not seen in years.

So, like so much else in 2022, my sense is that the world is making up for the two years when we couldn’t do anything, by having everything happen in a very short amount of time.

As of this writing I am about 60% of the way through Cacophonous. More if I take the short story I wrote in October 2021 and turn it into the last couple of chapters. I will certainly use a lot of it, but the book is significantly different from the short story so I will only bring over the bones of the first work.

Will I participate in NaNoWriMo again? Absolutely! There are no bad sides to such an event.

Whole Lotta Writing Going On

2022-11-202022-11-20 John Winkelman

Pre-Thanksgiving snowstorm

Brief update this week, on account of I have a very full plate.

No new book arrived this week, so here is a photo of the bird feeder outside my dining room window, before half again that much snow was added to the pile. It’s been a wacky couple of days here, weather-wise.

In reading news, I just finished Jim C. Hines’ Terminal Peace, and it is really good! A fine conclusion to a fun trilogy.

In writing news, I am fast approaching 50,000 words in my NaNoWriMo 2022 story Cacophonous. I expect to “win” before Thanksgiving, and possibly finish the draft by the beginning of December. And writing at this pace is turning my brain to mush.

Post-Election Exhaustion

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New books for the week of November 6, 2022

With the midterm elections mostly in the rearview mirror, barring a couple of races which were so close that they are going into runoff, or are still being counted, the world is returning to whatever passes for a state of normalcy. Donald Trump, along with all of his supporters, was once again proven to be a pathetic loser, and most of the neo-Nazi bootlicks who rode, or attempted to ride, his coattails into political office were rightfully kicked to the curb. There were the usual tears and accusations of rigged elections from the emasculated wingnut manbabies of the GOP/QANON/OANN/KKK/Fox News bloc (which is many different names for the same undifferentiated mass of jackboot fetishists), and there will inevitably be a backlash of new bills introduced which will attempt to limit voting rights to only conservative white Christian men who own property. Such are the goals of conservative white Christians in America.

Anyway. Enough about politics.

Only one new book arrived this week – Death in the Mouth the most of the recent spate of Kickstarter rewards. Friends, this book is gorgeous!

In reading news, I finished K.S. Villoso’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. It was great! When I am ready to start buying books again, I will pick up the sequel which, based on the excerpt published at the end of Wolf, should be excellent.

I just started Terminal Peace, the final volume of Jim C. Hines’ Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse trilogy. So far, it is every bit as good as the previous books in the series.

And on a whim, during breakfast this morning, I cracked open Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy, which I can already see I will need to put down until after November, else I will be so consumed reading it that I will not have any time to write.

In writing news, I am at something over 25,000 words in my NaNoWriMo story Cacophonous. Things are going very well so far and I expect to hit 50,000 well before the end of the month.

NaNoWriMo is Serious Business

2022-11-062022-11-06 John Winkelman

Praying Mantis at Blandford Nature Center, taken October 21, 2022

For the tenth year in a row, I am attempting NaNoWriMo. So far things are going very well, in that I am several thousand words ahead of schedule, and the story I am writing is still interesting to me, which is very important when writing. If my work is boring to me it will probably be boring to everyone else.

No new reading material arrived in the past week, which is fine, as I still have over half a thousand unread books and journals to work through, and that takes time. Lots and lots of time. Therefore, please enjoy this photo of a gravid female praying mantis which I discovered on a walk around Blandford Nature Center on the afternoon of Friday, October 21.

Currently I am reading The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso. It’s really good! I should be finished in a couple of days, and then maybe on through a few more issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, or something.

In writing news, it is all Nano, all day. Or at least those parts of the day when I am not working or sleeping or hanging with my honey, or teaching or eating or attending to the cats.

IWSG, November 2022: NaNo Or No NaNo?

2022-11-022022-10-28 John Winkelman

At this point NaNoWriMo 2022 has been in full swing for a little over 24 hours. I am a couple of thousand words into my story for the year, and enjoying the process immensely. But that means that I have little time for a long, detailed blog post. That being said…

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for November 2022 is:

November is National Novel Writing Month. Have you ever participated? If not, why not?

This is my tenth year participating in NaNoWriMo, and I have loved the experience throughout, even in those years where I didn’t get to 50,000 words. I recommend that everyone try it at least once.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.