Ku: Mountain Over Wind: Work on What has Been Spoiled
Monday, November 20th, 2006 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwydI was planning on giving up on NaNoWriMo today, since I've written 5,000 words in 20 days. But then I got an idea.
When I signed up, most of the things I wanted to write were not novels (including musing about the word count algorithm and a 50,000 identifier program). I picked an idea with a guiding structure, but my heart wasn't really in it. It was a novel I could write to prove I could, but it wasn't what I really wanted to write.
So with ten days left, I did what a good project manager would do. Shelve the floundering Borges-inspired project and start fresh on something better structured to writing 5,000 words a day.
The I Ching provides eight convenient characters: Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Wind, Water, Fire, Mountain, and Lake. It also provides context for all sixty four possible combinations of those characters. If I write 64 short stories of 782 words, I hit the magical mark. And I think writing eight short pieces a day is more manageable than writing 45,000 words of a novel in ten days. Plus I can "cheat" by starting each "chapter" with the translated text for each hexagram.
It's time for I. Wish me Chin.
Update: 963 words in an hour and a half; only 76 from cheating. If I can keep that pace up for the balance of the month, I win.
When I signed up, most of the things I wanted to write were not novels (including musing about the word count algorithm and a 50,000 identifier program). I picked an idea with a guiding structure, but my heart wasn't really in it. It was a novel I could write to prove I could, but it wasn't what I really wanted to write.
So with ten days left, I did what a good project manager would do. Shelve the floundering Borges-inspired project and start fresh on something better structured to writing 5,000 words a day.
The I Ching provides eight convenient characters: Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Wind, Water, Fire, Mountain, and Lake. It also provides context for all sixty four possible combinations of those characters. If I write 64 short stories of 782 words, I hit the magical mark. And I think writing eight short pieces a day is more manageable than writing 45,000 words of a novel in ten days. Plus I can "cheat" by starting each "chapter" with the translated text for each hexagram.
It's time for I. Wish me Chin.
Update: 963 words in an hour and a half; only 76 from cheating. If I can keep that pace up for the balance of the month, I win.
