hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0290.txt

Episode: 290
Title: HPR0290: NaNoWriMo.org
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0290/hpr0290.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:38:20

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Hello.
My name is Austin Bronx.
Last November, I participated in the National Novel Writing Month, that is nanorymo.org
N-A-N-O-W-R-I-M-O-D-O-R-G.
Now, the idea behind nanorymo is, on the 1st of November, you sit down and begin to write
a novel, and by the 30th of November, you have completed it.
Now, we're talking about a first draft, we're not talking about finished product, honestly.
But their target goal is 50,000 words, that's 50,000 words in four weeks.
Now, I mean, that seems really, really hard, and it is, but it's far from impossible.
And I did it.
In fact, I came into it about a week late.
I didn't find out about nanorymo until I think it was the 6th.
And I decided to join in then, it was kind of a, I don't know, kind of a lark at the
time anyway.
And I decided to give it a shot.
So I actually did it in three weeks instead of four, and quite naturally that kind of
moved the pace up quite a bit for me.
But I guess the question to start off with is, why did I do it?
Why did I choose to do it?
Well, for one, I'm a frustrated writer.
I've been a writer of fiction and plays most of my life since I was a kid, actually, before
I was a teenager.
I've never had anything published, never tried that hard, not because I didn't want to,
but, well, I guess I didn't want to, I didn't work that hard at the hustle part of that.
I've always had problems with that sort of thing.
But the actual doing of it wasn't that hard.
So I knew I could do it because I have done it in the past.
This wasn't the first book I've written, but I'd never done anything like that in that
kind of timeframe.
You know, I kind of always worked at it when I had the, you know, the time or the inclination.
But well, this was going to be a completely different sort of project, adding to the
why of it, aboard, mostly.
I'm a stay-at-home dad for a special needs child.
My wife goes off to work and gets to talk to adults all day, and I'm home with the boy.
And, you know, that has its rewards and its challenges.
One of the challenges is the fact that I don't get to work on the things that I have
historically enjoyed and have brought me some measure of satisfaction, writing, being
one of those things.
No, yes, I was pretty sure I could do this.
But I didn't know if I would, that is, if I would actually lose my way along the road
somewhere and just, you know, finally say, ask, it's not worth it to me.
I wanted to know if I could sit and actually make the damn thing happen.
So that was a challenge.
That was something I wanted to take on for exactly that reason.
And finally, I did have a story in mind.
I had had this idea sometime before, and I had never sat down to actually work on it.
So it seemed like a good opportunity to do that.
Now going into it, I knew that I would need to hunker down.
I would have to focus on this and make it a big priority.
And so I warned my family.
I warned them that this is something I was going to do, and that I would need their support,
that is, I would need a little time to myself in order to work on it.
It was only going to be three weeks, no matter how it turned out.
So, you know, I knew they could handle it, and they were very cool about that.
But I was straight about it right up front.
And then a RIMO advises you to tell everybody in your life.
I mean, tell your family, tell your friend, tell strangers because the idea is that you'll
get a support network out of that.
You'll get people that are always asking about it who want to help you achieve your goal.
You know, that's probably a good thing for some people.
Personally, I would find that builds more pressure for me than I would get any benefit out of it.
So I didn't really mention it to anyone, not that I really have anyone to mention it to.
I think I talked about it on the IRC in a couple of places here and there.
Not much, though, I really didn't talk about it very much to anybody.
Now, when I actually got into it, what I did, what I did for myself and what worked for me
is I set a regular schedule.
That is to say, I got up every day and I sat down and I worked.
Now, the days themselves kind of played out in their own way.
I'd have, you know, doctor appointments, so we'd have to go shopping or this, like, you know, things like that.
And that that punches a hole in anybody's schedule, but the days started the same way.
And in a way that that was good.
It set a tone for me.
It set a work tone.
In order to make it work, we have four computers at home.
We have three desktops and an EPC.
And at different parts of the day, I would find myself working on all of them,
depending on what I had to do.
You know, play with the boy and he, while he's busy doing something, I could get up and do something for, you know, 10, 15 minutes.
Or, you know, I'm doing the dishes or cooking or the laundry, whatever, whatever it is.
Wherever I happened to be in the house, there was by and large a machine I could get my hands on.
Plus, the EPC, the netbook, allowed me to work when I was out of the house.
And if I had an idle few moments, I could sit and I could pound out some words.
Now, that sort of thing may not work for anybody.
I had to be very fluid about that because I still had all those obligations that I had to meet.
But for me, it worked quite well because I didn't feel like it was wasting any time.
I always had the ability to sit down and work.
Not coordinate all these different chapters on all these different machines.
I uploaded everything to Google Docs as soon as I was done with it.
If I if I if I pounded out 100 words, when I was done, I put that on Google Docs.
And I was able to access it from the other machines.
Now, we're not properly networked at my house.
It's something else I got to work on.
But it also helped when I was out of the house, obviously.
You know, so that worked very well for me.
And it also was a backup and easy backup.
But additionally, I backed up everything to a thumb drive as well.
So I and that's every time I uploaded.
So I had continual backups on this thing.
The early day, in fact, the very first day I lost everything to a crash.
And you know, I almost gave up right then and there.
In fact, that was the very first crisis I had to negotiate.
But I I just went ahead with it again and made up for everything I lost.
And started saving like a madman.
Luckily, I didn't have any more troubles after that.
But I was ready for it and it gave me peace of mind.
Now, I'm not a good typist.
I'm a hot and packed kind of guy.
So as you can imagine, the quality of my work with regards to spelling and all that was really,
really bad.
Okay.
I mean, really bad.
It's almost like code that even I can't crack.
But that's okay, too, because the goal here is not a finished product.
In fact, the goal isn't even good work.
The goal is work, okay?
The philosophy behind a novel in 30 days is simply get something down.
You cannot make something nice if you don't have something to work with.
You know, you can't edit a blank page and you can't, you know, rewrite something you
haven't written, you know, get something down, anything down, okay?
Now, historically, I haven't always worked that way, but there's a real strong logic
to it.
And I might start taking, you know, a closer, a closer approach to this.
Now, I'm not going to use this, you know, a breakneck pace in my own work anymore unless
I participate in this again.
But the idea that you've got to get something down, otherwise the time you put in really
doesn't amount to anything is a very valuable one.
And that's probably a good writing lesson that I took away from this, even though I've
been doing this for a very long time.
And intellectually, I always knew that this put it into practice and it showed me very
clearly what that sort of philosophy can produce.
So I'm not saying I'm a complete convert to it.
I still like to edit as I go.
I like to polish my words.
I like them to sound nice in the ear when I can.
But you can always do that later if you have something to work with, to begin with.
I used a very sketchy outline for my novel going into it.
I spent, I spent a, I think, an hour or two on it, right at the beginning.
Very, very thin, very sketchy.
And I deviated from it quite a bit as I went on.
But it was always there and I always had it open and I always referred to it even later
when it really didn't apply.
And it helped me quite a bit.
At some point, about halfway through, I realized that I was trying to tell two different
stories.
And it was looking through the outline that really made that clear.
And that allowed me to focus on the first story.
And the first story is the book that I wrote.
Okay.
And if I ever do this again, I can do a sequel.
And I've already gotten that idea down on, you know, an outline somewhere.
So that helped me quite a bit.
And some people, they walk into it with very detailed outlines that they adhere to very
closely.
And some people just wing it without an outline of any kind.
I found a thin one helped.
I think a really carefully plotted thing would have taken away too much of my time to
put up.
And I would have felt constrained by it later.
So, you know, that's just the approach I took.
And people are really all over the map on that.
But if you do choose to use one, I would go one route or the other.
I would either polish it very, very well before you walk into Nano Rhymo.
If you choose to participate in Nano Rhymo next year, they do it once a year for the
novels.
They have another one that they do for screenplays, I believe it's in April.
But for the novels, it's in November.
And if you want to have a very detailed outline, if that would help you, I would walk in
to November with that already prepared.
That would save you a lot of your time because a detailed outline is a job on its own.
Otherwise, make it thin, make it quick, make it something just keeps the characters and
the plot in mind for you and just go with it after that.
Now again, the goal is 50,000 words in 30 days and people naturally get hung up on that.
They get hung up on the numbers.
You kind of have to because that is your goal.
Your goal isn't a perfect book.
Your goal isn't the best work.
Your goal is the words and because of that, some people try to count every single thing
they do towards their final word count, including their outline.
If it's a sketchy one like mine, you can include it or not.
It really doesn't amount to very much.
But if you had a very detailed one, 10,000 words or something like that and there are people
that do that and you add that to your word count, well, you're only cheating yourself.
There's no real prize to this.
The prize is a book, a book that you have that you didn't have before.
I am very much against that.
I think that's a mistake.
I think it hurts you in the end.
I think that the book is the book.
That is the outline.
But that's, again, there are some other opinions about that.
But by and large, people understand that you're there not to write outlines and you're
not there to write introductions and prefaces and all this other stuff.
You're there to do the story and that's what you're after.
Now, in order to get this done, I found I had to absolutely make it the sole priority
after the basics that I had to accomplish every day.
Family comes first, obviously, getting my wife to work, my son getting him to school.
He goes about an hour a day.
Getting all this stuff taken care of, food on the table, the laundry, cleaning the house,
what have you, these things have to get done.
Those are the basics.
I can't let that slide.
Now, some people let the house go, let everything go, let their family go.
I don't have that option.
I don't have that luxury.
Those things had to come first, right?
But after that was this project.
After that was Nanol Rhymo, okay?
And again, I told my family that's how it was going to be.
So I really didn't have any problems at all.
They were very cool about it.
And I found ways to fit it in.
And they just totally accepted that.
If I had to dash off and take care of something I had in mind, that was cool.
I think it has to work that way for everyone.
If you can make it your number one priority, if you can put everything else on the backburner,
do it.
If you can't make it the very next thing because the only way it works is if it becomes
a huge part of your life for that short period of time.
Now, that being said, I put in about four hours some days on this, two hours, other days,
when I was actively working hard on it.
So between two and four hours every single day, if you added it all up, and I'd start early
and I'd pick it up later in the day and I'd fit it in where I could.
And I almost always worked late into the night as well.
However, I lost my steam at one point.
Just as my fear, my prophecy came true, self-fulfilling perhaps, but there you go.
About two and a half weeks into it for me.
That would have been sometime in week three for the regular contest.
Remember, I came into it late.
When I took about two days off, I didn't write a thing.
And then after that, it was naturally hard to get back into the swing of things.
However, I took that time off because I was ahead of my word count at that point.
And I was burned out.
I was tired.
And I was seriously questioning the whole, what am I doing?
Why am I doing this?
What do I want to accomplish on this?
And it was at that point that I really understood why I got into it to begin with.
I'll get into that in a little while.
However, I was pretty close.
I was up past 40,000 words, I think.
So I was very close.
I wasn't quite close to the finish of the story.
But the 50,000 word count I was close to.
As a matter of fact, I hit my 50,000 words on the final day of the 30th of November.
But I wasn't quite done with the story.
And I actually put a couple more, a couple thousand more words into it to finally round out the final chapter.
And the final bit of it for the story, the first draft of it anywhere.
It was hard.
It was hard to scrape through that last week.
It was easy at that point, very, very easy to just stop.
So much easier to stop than to do anything else.
So that was where my crisis came.
And that was the one point where it became a real chore.
Now, yes, I hit my 50,000.
I was successful.
I won, as they say.
I was a winner of the Nanorimal thing.
Finishing it, though, it didn't bring any elation, any grand relief or anything like that.
I mean, think of it like I was slamming my face into a brick wall for three weeks solid.
That doesn't feel good.
But man, it feels good when you stop.
That's kind of how it was for me.
Now, looking back at it, I'm doing this on the 21st of January, 2009.
So it's been, well, we're looking at, you know, close to two months now since I finished it.
What do I have?
I have the first draft of a novel.
Now that was the goal of Nanorimal.
So on that level, I was successful.
I proved to myself that I could meet a ridiculous deadline.
And with enough diligence, I could meet it and I could succeed.
I guess I'm proudest of that when it comes to the achievement part of it.
Again, I already knew I could string 50,000 words together.
See, what I didn't know is if I could pass that crisis point, okay?
I found I could, but it was really touch and go.
Now, because this is a first draft, no one but myself has ever seen it, not even my family.
No one could read it.
I'm telling you, the spelling's bad.
I haven't even spell checked it.
I didn't take the time to even do that.
The sentence structure is bad.
There's, I mean, it's just, you know, impossible for anyone but me to read it right now.
So from that standpoint, after accomplishing all this, I'm still alone with it.
So there's still an isolation factor there that I didn't really account for.
That's fine.
That's fine, because no one ever tends to read my stuff anyway.
I mean, I have a blog, no one reads, and of course, I don't update it either.
That's probably part of it.
It was a lot of work, and no one but me has seen it.
And so I'm not getting the kind of feedback that my ego might appreciate right now, and
that's a factor.
For some people, it's a big factor.
I have yet to go back and work on it.
And to be perfectly frank, I'm not likely to any time in the foreseeable future.
I have other projects I want to do.
I have things that are priorities for me now.
Some of them are applications and interests, and other things are family.
We have things we have to focus on.
This economy isn't helping anything.
My wife's job is starting to look shaky, and we have, you know, we have our nails to
bite over that.
So this has taken, you know, it was a huge priority during November, and it is now not
one.
In a way, that's fine.
I've compartmentalized it, and it's a way of dealing with it, I guess.
You know, okay, all that being said, there's also another element to that.
See, I tend to drift in and out of things.
Sometimes I focus on them for almost obsessive amount of time, but I do drift, and sometimes
I don't put in the amount of time on an extensive project that I probably should, if I want
to see it to completion.
So I knew I could do this for three weeks.
I knew I could do that, but could I go back and work on it?
Because now the hard part comes when it comes to putting in time.
I mean, I have to clean up what I have, and then I have to do rewrites.
And that will take a tremendous amount of time and effort.
And quite frankly, I just don't want to, not right now anyway.
I never participated in the social aspect of nano-rimo.
It is quite a social thing for a lot of people.
They have extensive forums.
They try to organize local gatherings and get together.
It isn't just an online thing.
There are a lot of people that get together for right sessions in probably larger metropolitan
areas.
But I'm pretty sure that there are quite a few people who have met in real life through
nano-rimo and have made good friendships in real life or online.
I didn't do any of that.
I live out in the sticks.
And there wasn't anybody nearby doing anything like that for me or in this area, I should
say.
You know, I didn't participate online either, though.
I'm not sure why except that I think it would have distracted me quite a bit and taken
eaten into my time.
And that's fine.
It worked for me.
But there was also nobody else I could bounce my ideas off of or to help keep my enthusiasm
going.
So it was really all on me.
I think a local writers group in the future for me anyway, a local writers group would
be optimum.
But I really don't have a schedule that will allow me to get away and actually meet people
in the real world for a couple of hours every month or something like that.
Even once a month would be a burden right now.
So I don't think that's going to change.
Even if I decide to do this next year or if I decide to start applying some of this
more diligently and to work on my writing more regularly, that's not going to change.
And if I do anything, it'll probably have to be online because I'm on the computer anyway.
I did a couple of years ago, I got a mention this real quick.
I did about a year or so ago.
I was involved in the critter's workshop.
That's an online based story writing group.
Very, very big.
And by a guy named Andrew Bert, Cory Doctoro hates this guy.
They've had bitter, bitter wars over legal issues and all sorts of stuff.
That's fine.
I don't fully understand a lot of that anyway.
But critters is actually a very cool group.
And I won't go into that.
That's probably worth an episode all on its own.
But I'll put a link to the show notes and you can check it out.
If you like John Refiction of some sort, not even fantasy, just fantasy and science fiction.
It could be anything horror, it could be romance, it could be almost anything.
If you like that sort of thing and you're really interested in getting your work out there
and have people give you good critiques that is an excellent, excellent resource, a great
group to be a part of.
However, I found it to be a much bigger time commitment than I realized at first.
And I eventually had to drop it because it does involve reading a certain number of other
people's work and then sit down and writing critiques worthwhile good critiques for these
other people before you get your stuff seen.
And that was quite literally more than I can handle at the time.
I may get back into it at some point in the future, but right now, that's not something
I'm doing.
I do recommend that you at least check it out because it's interesting.
So I guess the final question is, will I do this again?
Will I participate in nano-rimo next November?
Well, ask me at the end of October.
Yeah.
Okay, from a productivity standpoint, I learned one thing about taking on a big project with
a short deadline.
You can do almost anything at all when you have to or in my case, you really, really want
to and you make it a huge priority, but you can't do it forever.
Okay.
Now the heart of the job, the quicker the burnout and that's obvious.
We all know that, but then it can maybe not.
It wasn't obvious to me and I had my share of shit jobs in my life with deadlines and
crazy work schedules and stuff and it wasn't really quite clear in this context for me until
I did it.
That being said, one person jobs are best done by just one person, no matter how much work
is involved, collaboration and community, they're all well and good, but if you end up
endlessly planning something when you ought to be doing something or worse yet, if you end
up having to redo everything or find yourself spending stupid amounts of time integrating
all the work, simply because people weren't on the same page to begin with, at the best
you're being inefficient and at worst you're working really, really hard on failure.
Now it's tempting to ask myself, I mean looking back if it was all worth it, but I think
that question seems to answer itself.
I set out to achieve a certain goal and I expected certain challenges along the way and I met
the goal by meeting the challenges.
I have what I was after and that's not the book, not really.
But the novel itself, it really wasn't my real goal, my real goal.
I also achieved and I have to say it's of a much greater value to me and what I'm talking
about is a clearer sense of my reach and my limits.
I now know just how hard I can run and for how long before I get winded, you know, at
this point in my life I mean, I used to test myself like this more often in the old days,
you know, I was younger before I had a family, before I met my wife, you know, before I settled
down, I had a challenging evocation, I had a busy social life, I had a hard job.
At certain points, I literally, this is a fact, at certain points I literally had hundreds
of people applauding me, cheering me and yet that same night I'd find myself crying in
my beer in bitter loneliness.
You see, it was that dichotomy, those extremes that pushed me, that tested me.
You know, in a way it was why I did the things I did back then anyway.
Now any deadline is a challenge and most of them in real life anyway, most of them are
not of our own making.
You know, some people thrive in that environment and that's great, but I'm not one of them.
Nano-Rymo was like swimming for my life against a rip tide and a sea of wet cement.
It sucked.
I didn't get off on it.
I didn't throw myself a party in triumph when I was done.
I had myself a drink or two except my family's congratulations and then I think I sat and
I watched a video that I forgot even as I was watching it.
So, okay fine, was it worth it?
Considering that I didn't do it for the so-called novel and I didn't do it for the bragging rights
since I really don't have anyone to brag to, I guess that's an open-ended question.
I did it to see if I still could do the impossible and if I could, would I, would I make the
effort?
Was it still important to me?
You know, for some people, this is writing, but for me, this was a sprint, a mad dash
going mock three with my hair on fire and, you know, apparently I need to do that on
occasion just to remind myself I'm a wife.
I want to thank you for listening and I apologize for your lost time if this was of no interest
but if it is and if you want to get in touch with me, get me at lostenbronksatgmail.com
that's L-O-S-T-N-B-R-O-N-X at Gmail.
Thanks again, take care and do something for yourself even if it's crazy.
Thank you for listening to H.P.R.R. sponsored by Kero.net so head on over to C-A-R-O.N-C for
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