Thanksgiving with the Harbaughs and a Rainy Day in Clevland

[Started a post about the Thanksgiving game and never posted it, so I'm combining a few thoughts on that one with a few thoughts about yesterday's game.]

RAVENS VS 49rs
Great complete team win by the Ravens on Thanksgiving. I was in Florida without access to to NFL Network, but we found a great sports bar to watch this game and the previous Bengals game. Mad props to Beef O'Brady's. They have TVs with sound in each booth. Wish I had something that near me at home.

Anyway, I'm beyond thrilled. Besides the last game @ Cincy this was the game I was most worried about left on our schedule. On paper at least. As we've seen this year, the Ravens are capable of losing to ANYONE on the road.

So my post-game thoughts.

1. Loved the balance. If you look at his stats, some people might say that Ray Rice had a bad game. Stats are beside the point. The run kept their defense honest so they could not completely key on Joe Flacco and helped to wear them down and also helped open up the pass.

If you looked at his stats, some people might say that Joe Flacco didn't have a spectacular game. Stats are beside the point. In a defensive battle like this against a team that doesn't make mistakes (that INT was only Alex Smith's 5th on the year and they didn't fumble at all) it wasn't the time to try for 300 yards passing. Joe had success moving the ball and had one excellent drive for a touchdown where he made multiple plays on 3rd and long. While not an "elite" quarterback, that was an elite-level drive. If he can string more of those together (keeping balance with the run) on a more consistent basis over the next couple of years maybe his name will be in that conversation without it being controversial.

2. Loved the way the defense stepped up without Ray Lewis. 9 sacks, tying a franchise record. Dominating performance against one of the best teams in the NFL. Kept Gore contained. Creative blitzes. Disciplined, hard hitting football. Although they stepped up when necessary to get the win last week, they did not look this good. There are so many players that I could mention, but I'm going to stick to Ladarius Webb and Cory Redding. They both stepped up big time. If our D can keep playing this way... well, good things should happen!

RAVENS @ BROWNS
I've read people say that it was an "ugly win," but it was beautiful to me. Yes, we missed field goals and could have put it away much earlier, still had trouble in the red zone and there were other blips as well, but we won against an inferior opponent on the road, which has been our "Achilles heel" this season. Using our run game, we completely dominated the Browns, it just didn't show up on the scoreboard as much as we would like.

1. Ray Rice is awesome. Enough said.

2. So is Ladarius Webb. I'm glad he's back to playing at the level we all expected his rookie season before his injury. Can't wait to see what he does next year after a full off-season. Between his injury setting him back some and the fact that he never really played corner before his pro-career, I think the sky is the limit for this guy.

Honestly, I don't really have the enthusiasm about this win to go much beyond that. The run game looked great and the pass rush continued to produce sacks and rushed throws, but other than that the team didn't look great. I hope we can continue to win against the less than stellar teams left on our schedule (including the Browns again), but at this point I'm not going to expect the team to look dominant against them. I'll wait for the final game against Cincinnati (hopefully!) and the playoffs for that and be happy.

NaNo Update

Sorry for the lack of posts this past week, but here is where I am:

I've broken 35k and have a total of four scenes left on my list to write.

Also, what was a very minor character has surprised me and not only do I think I can spin off a short story about him, but he solved a plot issue that was worrying me.

A lot of WriMos have been talking about "plot bunnies" and characters taking off and doing things they didn't expect. When I outline, which I have to do pretty thoroughly to get through NaNoWriMo, that type of thing usually doesn't happen to me. But I do discover little details about the characters and fill in the gaps in plot (like above).

Another observation: There have been a couple scenes that I've had to struggle through and was absolutely sure that what I was writing was absolutely terrible, but when I went back and reread to them to refresh myself to write a related scene, they really weren't as bad as I thought.

Getting close!

I broke 20k today

Oh, blogosphere, it's been a few days since my last confession...er... post.

Yesterday was the first day that I didn't hit the 1,667 quota. I only got in what I wrote at lunch. This had to do with my late night after the Raven's HUGE win over the Steelers. I know there is a sweeping song in some musical somewhere and if I could recall it, I would quote it here. Hahaha. I remained obsessed with Raven's coverage all day Monday, was exhausted and yet still didn't get to sleep until much too late.

Then today, this lack of sleep caught up with me. Not a good day for many reasons. I didn't write at lunch and I didn't go to the write-in like I was planning and I was feeling pretty lame and unproductive. But I stuck it out, skipped Glee and cranked out just over 2,000 words this evening so I could break 20,000 words. I knew getting to see that number would give me proper motivation.

Coming up in the book I have some emotional angst, a duel, threats from the equivalent of a mob boss, another duel (this one impromptu, unlike the first) and a kidnapping... all leading up to my climax, which includes... oh, well, I'm not going to risk spoiling that. ;-)

So lots of excitement (and hopefully another 30,000 words) to come.

Good News and Bad News

The good news: I'm still doing great at NaNoWriMo. I'm up to over 17,000 words, which means I'm way ahead schedule. My stats page says I only need to write about 1,300 to finish on time and that so far my average per day has been almost 3,000 words.


The mixed news: I have had to push through a couple of scenes. This means that they are not catching my attention enough to really enjoy writing them, which means that a reader certainly won't get really absorbed in reading them. This fact tells me that there is something going on in these particular scenes that will take some revision. It's not a huge deal.

For example, in one scene, my main character is seeking some information. I don't think I have the opposing character's motivations worked out well enough to make that scene really snap yet. But he will be involved later in the book, perhaps the later scenes will shed some light on this earlier one. I intend this character to be a thorn in Dakotashi's side for many books to come, so he needs to be fun to write! I didn't concentrate enough on setting him up during my brainstorming sessions because I was focusing more on the actual villain for this book.

The (possibly) bad news: At this rate, I'm afraid of running out of scenes to write before I get to 50k. This is only a problem if I'm worried about winning NaNoWriMo this year. It just means that this book isn't 100k. That's fine, as my real goal is to finish the book, right?

So far I have written approximately 13 scenes. (A few of them have been broken down into more than one piece that I haven't given a separate scene document to in my Scivener binder. One of these scenes was a surprise to me that I didn't have planned ahead of time.) I have 16 more scenes planned. If I estimate a little more words than the 17k I've written for the 13 scenes I've written so far, let's say 20k, that will be a total of 37k, not really anywhere close to the 50k needed to NaNoWriMo.

Well, I knew this might happen when I decided to finish the book I started last year instead of starting something new.

What can I do to try and add more words as I go? Well, one of the 16 scenes I have planned is actually the climax, which will turn out to be more than one scene for sure. I'm just not certain what's going to happen so I haven't planned it out yet. I figure it will come to me. I hope it will anyway. And then there are the requisite tying-things-up scenes after the climax as well. So that should add a pretty hefty chunk to my estimate.

Also, I can make sure to write more description. It's not my favorite thing to write and requires a lot of effort on my part to think of, which is why I tend to give it short thrift during nano, but I'm far enough ahead in my word count now that I can afford to spend some extra time on descriptive details if it will pile up some words for me. And it will be good for me too.

Anyway, there you have it! It's been exciting to see my word count climb up and check of the scenes I've had planned in my head. Hopefully, in week two, which is usually much harder than week one, I can continue the trend. Really, if I can finish my book AND get to 50k before my Thanksgiving vacation, that would be really, really awesome.

One more thing: GO RAVENS!!!! Let's beat the Steelers tonight.

First Write-in a Great Success

It's been a long day. Work is, well, it is what it is right now.

But, I've been a writing machine today! I wrote close to 1,500 words at lunch and then I went to my first write-in and wrote another 1,959 while I was there. That's close to 3,000 words today. My total is 10,272 so far. This might be my best start to NaNoWriMo yet.

With that much writing, I may need to rethink taking my computer with me. I won't normally get 1,500 words at lunch time so what I write then isn't much to type up and doesn't take me long, but 3,000 is a bit much. Also, the word wars were hard writing long hand because I tried to write faster and I couldn't physically go any faster. lol. It was also hard to count words. When I was typing I kept track and my totals for the 10 min word wars were less than 400 each time, which isn't horrible, but not terrific either. One person got up to 1,000 words! In 10 min!

But bringing my computer offers challenges, mainly due to the fact that my computer doesn't hold a battery charge anymore. If it's unplugged for more than 3 seconds, it yells at me.

On another note: Bruce from Baltimore Beatdown says my It's Steelers Week post is "very good." Check in the comments if you need proof. I am officially not a football idiot. ;-)

And another: I should not have had a caramel macchiato at 8:30 p.m. even it was the drink i thought i would like the best, but with the fewest calories.

And finally: I don't think I'll be getting much writing done tomorrow because I'm meeting a friend and her adorable new baby for lunch and going to my first Terps basketball (exhibition) game of the season with my brother tomorrow night. So it's a good thing I'm ahead. I expect if I don't hit a stumbling block in my plot, I'll be able to get a lot accomplished this weekend.

Got distracted already...

I got through over 5,000 words yesterday in 4 sessions. One right after midnight, then a short one at lunch (I spent most of the time writing yesterday's blog post lol), one after work and another after my break for Glee and The New Girl. It is clear that I don't have much of a life right now!

Lots of dialogue so far. Those scenes usually go pretty quickly for me. I can tell already that I'll need to make one of them a bit more antagonistic when I go back and revise. Crap! And I just thought of a way to do that!! If I don't write it down right away, I'll forget: Dakotashi needs to try to convince F to try and convince Lord N to call of that thing with his uncle and F proves reticent. Is that cryptic enough?

Today at lunch I got distracted by reading blogs about the Ravens. I did get a few words in, hopefully I can go full steam ahead after work. The write-in I was planning on going to got pushed back and I don't feel like handing in Baltimore until then, so I'll just go home. But tomorrow, I'll go to my first write-in in Columbia!

Nanowrimo…it's on!

So Nanowrimo has officially begun! I thought I'd take a few minutes of my lunch break (before I start with the serious writing) to update my progress so far and go over what I think my process will be. It's going to be fun with a few new technological tools in my pocket.

Last night I stayed up waaaay too late and got in my first quota, working from midnight to almost 2 a.m. and getting out about 2,300 words. When I can I like to push past the daily quota of 1,667 words to make up for whatever tough patches are in store for me this month. (Vacation with my sister and her kids at our parents' in Florida? And we are driving down!) My hero was being questioned by the police, so it was a fun scene to write.

Like I said, I have a few tools that I use, several of them new.

1. Notebook. I don't like lugging my computer around with me and I really find that the words flow better writing out longhand.

2. Scrivener. That said, I don't think I could live without Scrivener for outlining, counting my words automatically and yes, typing right into the program. It does save time typing up what i've written in my notebook. I use dropbox and an additional copy of the program on my work computer to keep me productive when I can sneak a minute or want to stay at my desk for writing at lunch.

3. This year, Scrivener is allowing me to do two awesome things. Previously, I might have printed out summaries of my upcoming  scenes or written down the next few in my notebook to reference, but this year with my driod phone (and it would actually be easier with an iPhone, but that's not what I have) and a combination of simplenote and the flicknote app on my phone, I can carry around all my upcoming scenes with my electronically. Since simplenote actually only syncs the body text (not Scrivener's index cards) I did have to copy the scene descriptions for each scene which I will replace with actual text. I can sync that as well and see what I wrote the night before so I know i'm starting in the right place etc. I could also write directly on my phone if I wanted and sync that back in directly to Scivener.

4. The other thing that scrivener is allowing me to do is carry the first half of my book (that I wrote for Nanowrimo last year) around with me on my nook! So if I can't remember a character's name or what they said in a certain scene, I can look it up immediately if I want.

My basic procedure is this: on weekdays, write as much as I can in my notebook longhand at lunch and after work wherever I go if I don't go home. Then when I do get home, type it up in Scrivener. This not only refreshes me as to where I am, I also like to add more as I go. When I work like that it's usually pretty easy to pick up the thread of the story and keep going. 

I am off to a good start, but it's a long month and a lot of words to go. Good luck to me and all the other wrimos out there. Let your words flow and don't look back, just keep writing!