Red Rising

In the next two weeks, I will be putting up my thoughts on two of the books on my "looking forward to" list from earlier this year. Next week, I will be looking at Simon Ings' Wolves. This week, however, my focus is on my most recent read.

Red Rising, the first in a same-named series by Pierce Brown, is also the author's maiden voyage into published writing. Its cover touts its protagonist, Darrow, as the new Ender or Katniss. Its sleeve depicts it as a perfect book for Hunger Games fans. But was it all that?

The book is definitely in the genre of The Lord of the Flies (sharing living quarters with The Hunger Games and Battle Royale): a bunch of youths are placed in an artificial world devoid of overt adult interference and must compete either to be the greatest or to merely survive. It shares a little more with Suzanne Collins' work, as both Katniss and Darrow are attempting to incite rebellion against an overly-oppressive central state. In this case, Darrow is a member of the 'Reds': the lowest caste in a futuristic, solar-system-spanning society which is arranged in colours. Reds are at the bottom, 'Golds' are at the top. Ruling over these Golds are members of their own Colour: the 'Peerless Scarred' who take pride in their idea of a meritocracy, where the strongest must lead (indeed, 'Demokracy' is illegal and Brown makes a funny point in an early chapter as to its downfalls).

As I mentioned in the new year, the idea of rebellion on Mars is not a new idea. The film version of Total Recall made a particularly cheesy attempt at this, as did the video game, Red Faction. Socialism and Mars both have 'red' in common after all. In the background of this work, Brown also works in a lot of mythology from Roman history: their gods, architecture, and societal structure, as well as allusions to the Fall of Rome due to festering corruption in its core.

One of many Mars + Socialist = Red Theme stories

Red Rising is two very different books in one. The first (and thankfully shortest) sets up Darrow and his life in the mines of Mars. It shows the injustice of his life and makes him a thoroughly unlikeable character (if not as unlikeable as Asher from Karen Miller's The Innocent Mage). He lives a short life where he is married early to his sweetheart, but nearly kills himself working so as to win prestige so she doesn't have to sell her body for more food for them. Yeah, it starts pretty heavy. (The only part heavier occurs in the second part of the book, with allusions to serial rape. So this isn't exactly a children's novel.)

This first part is not great. The writing goes too fast and so misses important details. Darrow's surgical transformation from Red to Gold is breezed over. Indeed, other parts of the book breeze over details with a liquid precision too, which I would love to have seen expanded but perhaps not at the risk of turning this into an eight-hundred page tome. (Ed: Please read the addendum to this review for an update on this.)

It is when we get to the second half of the book, the actual Hunger Games component, that the real action begins. But not only action. Darrow's characterisation emerges and he actually becomes a protagonist we root for. His philosophy emerges and his drive to win. Somehow his ability to fight, despite rarely having done so before, comes out here. The writing slows down and enjoys the politics of his situation, and the plot unfolds beautifully. The original 'godly' influenced Houses for which the children all fight in quickly descend into the strategies of their particular leaders.

This part is excellent. Not only does it continue the theme of unjustness and a cancer at the heart of society, which I made mention of earlier, but the characters become human: they cry, cheat, hurt, kill. Brown throws in a number of stunning twists (and I do love effective twists) so that, as a reader, you are never fully comfortable with Darrow's position. Deceit or assassination might always be just around the corner, and even when he has power he may not keep it one moment to the next. His revelation in terms of keeping loyalty, toward the middle of the book, is an excellent turn in his own character and the direction the book takes, so that it is not just a standard Hunger Games scenario. Like Katniss, to win he breaks the rules. Even in the finishing pages of the book, I had no idea what was going to happen, or whether he was about to be betrayed.

I can only see one significant plot-hole in this work. The Peerless Scarred, by going through what they go through, must all be scarred, battered, one-eyed individuals. And yet while the book makes mention of scars on the faces of the Scarred, these seem almost ritual, not war-earned. Unless this is cleared up in the next book (hyper-advanced medicine or similar) it seems like most of the Peerless Scarred would come out with all kinds of missing appendages and psychotic traumas. But that seems a minor issue.

I admit, on reading the opening chapters of Red Rising I scoffed at the reviews which compared this to The Hunger Games. And those chapters still need a lot of work to make the character likeable and to set up his motivation in a way that we, the readers, will care for him. But in the page-turning rest of the book, I cannot fault a single word (actually, I think there was one typo).

In complexity and background it is not an adult epic fantasy like Song of Ice and Fire or The Wheel of Time. However, I can see why it is a natural progression from The Hunger Games as this is clearly an older 'young adult' novel, or for those adults who want a light read without too much detail.

This is a really good start on Brown's series, and the book concludes its own story brilliantly whilst still leaving plenty of room for its sequels. (Actually, I had no faith it would conclude at all, but it did so swiftly and unexpectedly, in ways I would never have guessed!)

The Ups: Fast-paced, well-written second half, a strong inner-voiced character and it invoked the desire in me to keep turning pages well into the night. Nail-biting, cheek-chewing treachery that always keeps you on edge.

The Downs: Slow start, skipping over important aspects of how and why, with light treatment of serious adult issues. Motivation for the protagonist is a little threadbare and a head-strong, rage-filled protagonist supposedly born without the luxuries of education, tactics and artificial muscle growths such as others have make him unlikely and at times unbelievable.

The Verdict: 3.5 haemanthus blossoms out of 5

It kept me reading once I got past the opening chapters. Indulge it that little bit and it will reward you. Pierce Brown looks to be one of those 'must watch' authors in the future. I will be eagerly anticipating this one's sequel, Golden Child.

Addendum: For some inexplicable reason, my copy of the book ended up missing three chapters (the three key chapters which depict Darrow going under Mickey's knife to transform into a Gold, and then his training and entry into the Institute, including the set-up of other important characters). I have since found those and read them. While they definitely go into more physical detail about his transformation, they also bring questions to mind about how Darrow can be so mentally skilled despite being a lowly, uneducated Red. Still, they were possibly the worst chapters to miss. I apologise to any readers of my blog who were put off by that. The flesh-sculpting of Mickey the Carver also explains how the Peerless Scarred can end up being whole again post-wargames.

The Way of Kings - The Stormlight Archives (Book 1)

Since the writings of Tolkien, developed over the years into its own semi canon, the genre of fantasy has had its staples. It is so easy to suspend disbelief in a book that follows on from its predecessors. We accept that there are elves: who live for centuries, are light and lithe, powerful magic users, graceful and sharp-featured. Orcs and goblins are brutal, twisted creatures with grey or green skin, jaws like wild boars, and a knack for evil though not villainy.

The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, is astounding because it is none of that. Indeed, its similarities to our world of Earth are as set in reality as a work of science fiction on an alien planet. Even that other epic series of fantasy, The Wheel of Time (also finished by Sanderson after Robert Jordan's untimely death), relied on staples we take for granted: trees, grass, weather.

In a chapter toward the end of the book, Sanderson remarks on this phenomenon as one of his side characters enters the land of Shin, where high mountains protect against the raging Highstorms that devastate the surrounding lands. Here, the character finds grass underfoot which does not draw into itself when touched; trees which do not move, but display their leaves in open defiance of the sky. It is a wonder, which is all the more wonderful since Sanderson has spent the rest of the book allowing his reader to become so involved in his world that we no longer recognise his strange world as surreal.

But Sanderson does not just play with the local flora and fauna (and even dogs are chitinous and insectoid). Novel ideas dominate his pages. My favourite, the 'spren': emotions taking form in physical bodies, appearing and disappearing due to unknown phenomena. Victorious armies create small golden gloryspren, festering wounds attract rottspren, windspren joy in trickery and dying people see deathspren. We even get a look at the perspective of a scientist of this world, who has made it his life to document all kind of spren in existence, from the fabled 'intoxicationspren' to a huge spren which rise up from the waters, guardian-spirit style, to draw something out of witnesses before sinking again beneath the waves. Even this scientist questions whether spren cause their associated emotions, or are caused by them. Do rottspren feed on rotting flesh? Why then can one protect a wound by washing it with water (which the rottspren abhor)? Do deathspren kill, or do they feed off of the last energies of a dying being?

Kaladin the truly Stormblessed

Science, reasoning, logic and philosophy predominate through the pages. The main characters have depths beyond their clichéd surfaces. The slave is actually a surgeon, the warlord is a philosopher, the thief is a scientist. Atheism and religious zealotry war through the pages, each attempting to explain the meaning behind the greater tale. In fantasy, atheism is a little hard to explain when the gods are made flesh. Sanderson not only manages to create a convincing atheist, but also a convincing atheism. Is the Almighty real? Two very different solutions are drawn by the end of the book. I won't spoil any more than that though.

Only one thing is jarring in the reading of this book. Sanderson has followed an epic's path of changing his narrator each chapter. This is understandable. As a reader, it leaves one feeling eager to read on and find out what happened to the character left at a cliffhanger. Instead, the reader has to pass through another chapter with a different narrator, and is left just as hooked on that character's story by the end of that reading. This has been put to great use in novels for decades. The Wheel of Time made excellent use of this, once it had introduced the other characters from its main character's perspective. Over time and books, these characters had a chance for their own voices to grow. The Saga of Seven Suns played with this, allowing its readers to get attached to characters before snuffing them out (similarly with A Song of Ice and Fire). Sanderson's perspective characters, for the most part, never meet. Shallan (who is said to be the main view of the upcoming Book 2: Words of Radiance) is hinted at joining the others at the end of the book, but never does. Perhaps because of the lack of interaction of these characters, ending each chapter as he did, Sanderson left me feeling like I held the fraying end of the character's story each time. I wanted to keep reading but I felt cheated and frustrated each chapter, rather than eager as in the other epics above. I do not know if this was his intention. Given that this inspired just as many emotions in me as the others did however, this is hardly a criticism of the author's structuring style.

It is easy to create a book in which everything goes right, but so much harder to twist the heartstrings when things go wrong. In each book I have loved there is always a memorable point: a point that, in a sense, makes the book worth having read. Those points are always the lowest or the darkest for me. Sometimes (as in The Knife of Never Letting Go) that is the killing of a loved character, or the point where everything seems on the brink of disaster (such as Rand's ascent to Dragonmount in The Gathering Storm). In The Way of Kings, it was far more Lovecraftian in its unexplainable horror. Shallan, a character able to memorize a scene instantly and then draw it, discovers that she is surrounded by tall robed figures with shifting geometric symbols where they should have heads. Only, they only appear in her drawings and no others can see them. She thinks herself gone mad and begins sketching frantically to see if they are real. The defining moment comes when she sketches one reaching out for her and then she reaches out to see if it is real or merely a hallucination. She touches something. And there I got chills. These creatures are everything that Doctor Who tried to do with 'the Silence' (creatures you forget when you no longer see them) and failed to achieve that feeling of horror. That moment made the book worth reading for me.

Skyeels are a favourite
of mine. 

This short review hasn't even touched on a number of things included in the book.

Like how each Act of the story is broken up into blocks, with interludes of perspectives from characters who are never mentioned again. Or how each chapter is fronted with a saying, history, or recording of last words, the latter of which's importance is only realised in one of the concluding chapters. Or even of the beautiful sketched artwork detailing the creatures of this land, which really absorb the reader into it. Not to mention the idea of glowing gemstone money, gemhearts or shardblades. It would take as long as the book to sum up why I enjoyed Sanderson's work so much, so I'll leave off by just saying: do yourself a favour and read it.

The Ups: A truly unique fantasy world, with deep characters and so much thought put into motives, world-crafting, and the results of each character's actions.

The Downs: Frustrating when the action moves away from one perspective character to another. Not done as smoothly or as coherently as I could have hoped. A little long-winded in parts.

The Verdict: 4.5 bookspren out of 5

Overall, the book is beautifully written, giving hints at its greater meaning and then dashing them at the next chapter. Sanderson is creating a masterwork here, and I can hardly wait for the second.

Top 5 Books 2013, and a Few Thoughts on 2014

Welcome to 2014 everyone! I am sure many of you have resolutions planned, or already in action. Some of you may have decided to skip the resolutions this year. 

A Memory of Light - my favourite novel of 2013

Last year, I resolved to read more. While I probably didn't read as many as I had hoped to (including some of the more ambitious of them: The Metamorphoses, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Art of War), whether from resolution or from being finished with tertiary study, I did chew my way through quite a few. 

My top five books for the year (taking only one from each author):

1. A Memory of Light (Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson) - Wow. Was this only last year? One day I may try and review the whole of the Wheel of Time series, but needless to say it is an epic work that sadly outlasted its author. The climactic chapter, 'The Last Battle' (in length longer than some other books) was breathtaking from start to finish, and the final chapter (written by Jordan before his death) was a perfect conclusion with a satisfying tying off of loose threads, but which also raised a number of nagging questions.
2. The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss) - There is little that can be said here that has not been said elsewhere. This book took a long time to write, and it shows. It is excellently crafted, a gritty fantasy (becoming so popular of late). Well worth a read, though its focus on one character means it is not as gripping as other fantasy series have been. Some claim it to be an adult Harry Potter because of its protagonist's attendance at an Oxford-style school of magic, but thereabouts the similarities end.
3. Abbadon's Gate (James SA Corey) - Final book in The Expanse series, this book felt so short in story, but its page count remained lengthy. I absolutely love its authors' (for there are two despite the pen-name) take on hard sci fi. The lack of artificial gravity, the deadliness of space and its fast-flying projectiles (go watch Gravity if you still have doubts on this point) and the Firefly-esque attention paid to a small freighter crew all combined to make a realistic sci fi with some pertinent points about humanity and our place in the cosmos. I very much look forward to the fourth in the series, Cibola Burn.
4. Railsea (China Mieville) - This, rather than The City & The City, ended up in my top five for 2013
   
   
   because it is, on the surface, a young adult novel. It is a coming of age story of a boy seeking to leave home, who (in Mieville's style) is swept along on his adventure by forces beyond his control. The book is essentially a sci fi adaptation of Moby Dick, set on a planet with rails covering a 'railsea' inhabited by giant burrowing creatures mutated and deadly. My favourite part of the book is how Mieville plays with his reader, chapter to chapter, talking about genre expectations and playing around with language. (You see this from the beginning, where he replaces all 'and's with & - a symbol just as tangled as the railsea.) The ending is, in Mieville spirit, completely depressing.
5. Poison Study (Maria V Snyder) - At first I thought this book very childishly written. And it is. Its teenage protagonist is everything you might expect from a stereotypical teen character in a bad fantasy novel: whingey, surly, falling in love in a slightly masochistic way. If I hadn't been stuck on a bus with nothing else to do, I probably wouldn't have read it. I'm not entirely sure I'm glad that I did. This book is here for one reason: a rape scene hinted at through the whole of the book, and so emotive in its own hollow-souled way that it has left me feeling tarnished ever since. I can't recommend this book. But I can't bring myself to call it badly written either.

And honourable mentions to:

• Magician (Raymond E Feist)
• The Prince (Machievelli)
• Storm Front (Jim Butcher) (Full review here.)
• The Innocent Mage (Karen Miller)
• The City & The City (China Mieville)
• The Wise Man's Fear (Patrick Rothfuss)

My hopes for this year are for this blog to continue in a more frequent fashion than in previous years. I will be focusing mainly on books, though with the time it takes to read one of those huge speculative fiction novels, I will be mixing it up with films and perhaps the occasional video game review.

Gorgeous cover art done
by Jeffrey Alan Love

In particular for books, I am looking forward to:

• Red Rising (Pierce Brown) - Red shares connotations with Soviet uprisings and with Mars. Which is perhaps why such a story (uprisings on Mars) has been done over and over (the original Total Recall film, Red Faction). I will be looking forward to Brown's treatment of Red.
• Wolves (Simon Ings) - By the name (before I saw the author) I assumed it a sequel to Wool, but it seems I was completely and happily wrong. A cyberpunk style tech-heavy sci fi of alternate reality, I am looking forward to what Ings will do here. Plus, its cover (done by artist Jeffrey Alan Love, who also redid Ings' back catalogue with some amazing art) is to die for.
• The Gospel of Loki (Joanne M Harris) - Selling itself as an 'unofficial history of the world's ultimate trickster' this is surely capitalising on the success of Thor. But who cares? I love a good trickster.
• Words of Radiance (Brandon Sanderson) - Book Two of the Stormlight Archive. I have just finished The Way of Kings and plan on putting up a review soon. Needless to say I loved it.
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman) - Gaiman is a brilliant writer. One need only read American Gods for proof of that. This upcoming novel looks like Gaiman-meets-Lovecraft: a match I need to read.

It's going to be an excellent year!

(p.s. I can't seem to get 'Let It Go' from Frozen out of my head. It gets better every time I hear it. Perhaps it will be as timeless a classic as Disney's second golden age songs.)

Movie: Frozen

It always seems somewhat ironic to watch an American Christmas movie in Australia, and with 30 degree temperatures this year, Disney's latest animated musical, Frozen felt a little misplaced, though it was a great movie.

Frozen is a story primarily about Anna, a princess of Arendelle locked away from her people after she suffers an ice magic curse from her sister. As far as curses go, this one is pretty minor: Anna's hair changes colour and that's about it. But when her sister loses control of her powers, it is up to Anna to save the day.

Now I say this story is primarily about Anna. It has a pretty big cast of protagonists (with some surprising voice talent) which do not really fit cleanly into the archetypal characters which Disney has relied on for decades. Taking centrestage, we find Kristoff (the ice vendor) and Sven (his reindeer), Elsa (the Snow Queen) and Prince Hans (the roguish 'prince'). Supporting these, we have trolls, savvy Dukes (including the always-excellent Alan Tudyk), an animated snowman named Olaf (who gets one of the funnier songs of the movie) and a stereotyped Nordic trader. 

There are a lot of characters sharing stage, and the subplots advance rapidly. As a result, I found the movie a little confusing, the characters bouncing from one event to the other without much of a central plot line. Heroes become villains and villains become goofy side characters. Without a central villain or hero of the piece, it just seems like the whole plot is pushed forward by luck and happenstance. This is unfortunate, because there is a very strong story beneath it all, which the script could have done more for. 

The animation is excellently done, and the animators had a lot of fun with everything they could do with snow and ice, giving the whole thing a magical feel. The main characters have little quirks and it looks like Disney is making little changes each new movie to settle on a unique animated style for its characters. They really play around with the animations during the singing, particularly during song 'For the First Time in Forever'. No complaints here!

I enjoyed the movie a lot, thanks in huge part to two things. 

Elsa's inner struggle is a big
tug on the heart-strings.

Firstly, the singing is excellent. Fans of Veronica Mars would have heard star Kristen Bell singing once before (S01E12), but it still surprised me to see her name in the credits at the end of the movie. She takes a strong lead, only overshadowed by Idina Menzel of Wicked fame who brings her iconic singing voice to the Snow Queen Elsa and makes the movie feel like Wicked done by Disney. I particularly recommend 'Let It Go' and 'For the First Time in Forever' which felt like big Broadway numbers. 'In Summer' was funny, though it probably should have melted away a bit sooner. Finally, 'Do You Want to Build a Snowman' was a cute montage song for the two girls growing up. The songs aren't particularly memorable, and we probably won't be adding them to our Disney playlists alongside 'A Whole New World', 'Under the Sea' or other favourites, but they are good songs.

The second reason I enjoyed Frozen was its plot twists. While I did find the plot a little confusing and atypical to standard Disney fare, it had some of the best twists I have ever seen. Without spoiling the movie for anyone, there were two particular moments of the film that gripped me: when Anna finally returns to Hans for him to save the day, and the resolution of the snow storm at the end of the movie with its act of 'true love'. The first is a far more devious and adult twist than I have ever seen in a Disney movie before. The second turned what I thought would be a cheesy ending into a real tear-jerker and a pleasant twist on Disney's bread-and-butter "prince saves the damsel" plot.

Frozen has been out in America for a while, but for some reason Australia is only just getting it. I would definitely recommend seeing it if you get the chance, though I wouldn't say you need to go out of your way for it. Try not to spoil it too much for yourself, because that first time plot twist is a beautiful one. And while I didn't leave singing its songs, I would definitely consider putting it on TV next Christmas.

The Ups: Beautiful singing, excellent snow/ice animation, and jaw-dropping plot twists.

The Downs: No solid plot line, a good helping of random events, and subplots which seem to get away from the main plot lead to a confusing movie. 

Verdict: 3 melted snowmen out of 5

I am really pleased with the way Disney is going. This is a refreshing twist on Disney's archetypal plot lines, and an overall wonderful movie.

Storm Front - The Dresden Files (Book 1)

I walked out of Broken City (Allen Hughes, 2013) earlier this year with a sense of awe for just how well it paid homage to the film-noir genre, and with a clear vision that, “Wouldn’t it be great to mix fantasy and hard-boiled?” “No need,” a friend suggested, “Haven't you read the Dresden Files?” I took the opportunity to take him up on that last week and I must say, I was pretty impressed.

The Dresden Files is a series of fantasy/P.I. novels written by Jim Butcher (which is a great pseudonym if not his name). It was first published in 2000, with a short-run television series in 2007, so you can see I am a little late to the party here. The first book in the series, Storm Front, sees its protagonist, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden tackling a particularly tricky (and grisly) murder. 

The setting is like a modern-day Raymond Chandler: a lone-wolf P.I. working from his tiny office, a month behind on rent and living hand-to-mouth. The twist is, of course, that Dresden is a wizard. It hits all of the hardboiled keys: Dresden is a self-proclaimed loner, living in modern-day Chicago, but he alone “has seen it's true face” (in the words of Rorschach's Journal, Watchmen). As a private investigator (or wizard for hire) he has the tenacity of a lock-jawed guard dog, refusing to let go of a case even after he is dismissed from it, putting everything on the line so that, in one memorable scene, he is even picked up by the police naked on the street in a thunderstorm, battered, bleeding and bruised. And most of all, he has an unquestionable moral code that tends to get him into trouble. Butcher takes the archetypal characters from a genre defined by stories like The Big Sleep — the damsel, the reporter, the femme fatale (in Butcher's case, a literal vampire), the noble gang boss, the reclusive barman — and plants them firmly into his own world, which has a sense of familiar surrealism more reminiscent of Gaiman than Miéville.

I can see why it only made
it to one season.

The mix of wizard and P.I. is a match made in, well, a gritty alter-Chicago. Both are fringe-dwellers, with knowledge and abilities which the police don’t — or are unwilling — to use. The book has its own magical equivalent of “turn in your badge”, giving Dresden a literal deadline to solve both of his cases. Storm Front keeps its reader just-barely informed about its main character, leaving tantalising clues to his broken past but not giving us time to focus overly on them. The plot moves forward in convenient leaps of logic, intuition and (most of all) lucky breaks. In an era of high-fantasy wizards dominated by Rowling, Sanderson, Feist and Rothfuss, it is a refreshingly 'average' take on wizardry.

The book falls down a little with its mystery, leaving some aspects of Dresden unanswered (like what happened with the people in his past he killed — his old master and his old girlfriend?) I can’t decide if Butcher plans on filling us in in future books, or if Dresden himself can’t find the words. The writing is very good, though not as compelling as some other books circulating at the moment. It takes position as a good start to a pulp series, with a much-needed twist on both the wizardry and the P.I. genres, though nothing to particularly write home about.

I am greatly looking forward to the other 14 however, with the latest set to come out in January 2014. I will be interested to see what happens when Butcher exhausts the hardboiled references and fleshes out his own world more. 

The Ups: The book revels in its grittiness; creates a grand vision for its reader and leaves other parts for us to fill in; it is an original idea that untames the recently romance-strewn genre of urban fantasy.

The Downs: Keeping so close to its hardboiled roots leaves it feeling more like an homage than a book in its own right, hopefully this is just due to its position as series starter.

Verdict: 3.5 cowboy-boot-wearing pentacles out of 5

Definitely worth reading if you are after a more adult pulp series on the way home from work.

Full Circle

In 2010, I attempted NaNoWriMo. I say ‘attempted’ because it resulted in a very poor attempt which you can read about below if you have such a desire. Back then, my excuse was university, work, partner, and any number of things which I felt could excuse writing 1,667 words per day. The result? About two days of writing and then nothing. But in 2013 I gave it another shot. This time I found myself between contracts, graduated from university and having just finished my last long-term goal of becoming an admitted lawyer. 

I beat the 50k goal to write 52,210 words by November's end. 

Casually reading through some of the posts before this one, I can see immediately where I went wrong. This year's competition was different for me for a number of reasons, which I will try and narrow down to just a few. These are the things I learned from NaNo 2013.

Do Not Delete

I feel this is the most important rule of all. I write at about 1000 words an hour, and that's when I get into a writing free flow. Which means every hour I spend, I get 1000 words closer to my goal. But this also means every lot of 100 words I delete sets me back six minutes. NaNo is difficult for editors, I think, because we are all perfectionists at heart. You have to be a perfectionist to want to 'fix' something that its writer thought perfectly readable. To write 50,000 words in a month, however, you need to let go of your inner critic and just accept that it is your first draft. It won't be perfect. There will be mistakes and plot holes, continuity errors and name changes. You can fix all of that once you get through the month.

For me, I had to ban myself from reading anything I had written. I still haven't read my whole story through, as I am still writing it. It was easier not to read anything, and so not be tempted into rewriting or deleting it.

Use Your Friends

And not just the ones you abandoned to hide away and write. I suppose some authors find seclusion more rewarding, without the temptation to socialise. But I say 'use your friends' in that you should be telling them, every day if you need to, about your accomplishments for the day. Facebook was instrumental in keeping me going, because I knew if I didn't make my word limit, I would have to own up to it to them. On that note, there are other 'friends' you can use who understand you more. The Sydney NaNo group was a huge part of why I managed to keep writing this year. 

Don't Write Sequentially

I was very pleased to find the Header option of Word finally came in handy. With each chapter under its own header, I was able to leap around my book and write later chapters when I got bored of earlier ones. That way my story never stalled. This was perhaps only so helpful because I began NaNo with only a vague sense of what I wanted to write. It wasn't until about a week in that I had an idea of where the story was going; two weeks before I spent one evening making a bunch of new chapter headings and summarised what happened in them, and so realised that there was no way I would fit the book into 50,000 words (much less 100,000). Chapter numbers should not hold you back either. My chapter 32 became chapter 40, while my chapter 28 dropped to 16. It was a very organic style of writing, better suited to NaNo than to writing a setting-rich book with well fleshed-out characters. I can always add the latter in later.

Coffee Shops are Sanctuaries

The Lawrence Project (Manly) where I spent
many rainy days writing on that green sofa.

I never understood the author's fascination with coffee. The late nights, surely, but I always found myself with brighter ideas early in the morning. It is said that 10–11am is the most productive time to work. This year, however, I found myself visiting a hipster joint down the road from my partner's place any time I stayed at hers. I looked forward to it. Not for the coffee, but for the empty room filled with plush chairs and no Internet access. I suppose in the same way, I enjoy buses (though not nearly as much!)

With no distractions, plentiful water and food, a soft chair and relaxing music, I probably knocked out about two fifths of my total in a single coffee shop.

Writers Have a Reservoir, and it can empty!

Finally, I learned that I cannot write unsustained for a long period of time. There came a point in writing that I felt like I had exhausted all creative potential in my mind. This wasn't just a writer's block — which I tackled with plentiful use of dream sequences and fight scenes — this was like I had tapped the last of my creativity and had nothing left. Words I wrote felt hollow. It was then I realised I had to stop and go live life a bit. One of the suggestions of NaNo is to stop reading altogether in November. Yet I found that reading a book just made me want to write my own again. Painting helped restore some colour in my mind. And exercise (just going for a walk) and sunlight seemed to refill that reservoir. 

NaNo is over for the year but I am still going. I had the opportunity to do a daily commute into and out of the city (an hour and a half trip) every day for the last two weeks. My writing has slowed a little since November ended, but I am up to 60,000 and still going!

Hopefully this will help some of you who struggled with NaNo. But in any case, you should take heart if you tried. My first time I hit 3,000. My second I hit 10,000. I figured anything over that was a win. Look at me now!

On the Process of Story Generation

I have about four million different stories buzzing through my head at any given moment. All of them are in some way influenced by the television I watch, the books I read, or the stories I roleplay out with friends. So choosing one story for NaNoWriMo was really quite difficult.

I wanted to write something fresh, that I hadn't thought of anything for before. Something I hadn't planned out carefully, constructed a perfect world with climate that made sense and factions all designed. A story like that has constraints. This story couldn't have anything to stifle its creativity.

At about two in the morning, I was about to go to sleep but figured I should probably make a start on my story. I started writing, got about 200 words in and deleted the whole thing. It wasn't right. I didn't connect with the characters, and the story wouldn't go anywhere.

I began again, and was surprised how quickly I came out with 500 words. Then, the beginning of the story established, I fell asleep.

Today was spent thinking about where to take the story, for I had really started without thinking of where it would go. But I think I have it planned out. It is set in a world similar to Terry Pratchett's Diskworld in that it disobeys the very laws of physics. But hey, wizards did it. This is a world I had designed for a Dungeons and Dragons game: a world where giant birds roamed the skies, where people rode them in sky and on land. Where the water which fell from the sides of the land flowed back in currents across the sky to fall once more onto the land.

The story will draw on many tales of the Daoine Sidhe (people of the mounds - Irish fairies). It took all day to lay out the plot, but I believe I finally have it. Of course, this is at the delay of my studies.

The biggest hurdle over, I think I am ready to conquer this story. My only problem today was starting the prologue with the main character a baby. I will have to do a summary of him growing up if I'm to get anywhere with this story. Also, just now considering merging the Prologue with chapter one.