{"id":5850,"date":"2012-11-02T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2012-11-02T16:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=5850"},"modified":"2012-11-02T11:00:37","modified_gmt":"2012-11-02T16:00:37","slug":"stick-with-what-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=5850","title":{"rendered":"Stick With What Works"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_5851\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5851\" style=\"width: 291px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/nanowrimo-sidebar.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5851\" src=\"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/nanowrimo-sidebar.png\" alt=\"NaNoWriMo Sidebar\" width=\"291\" height=\"507\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5851\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">GAZE UPON THE FAILURE<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Okay, that title is completely a lie &#8212; but after taking a genre risk over the summer, I wanted to get back to something I feel relatively comfortable writing: hello, sci-fi.<\/p>\n<p>My first NaNoWriMo victory was a sci-fi story. In the years previous I had tried out early-20s ennui, romance, mystery, and urban fantasy. And my results were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Ennui (2005)<\/strong>: I wrote about 1500 words on day one before I got bored with myself.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Urban Fantasy (2006)<\/strong>: This was my best failure, at around 27,000 words. It was a vampire story set in Alaska;\u00a0there were underground facilities and\u00a0hierarchies\u00a0and if I ever find those notes, I might take a stab at it again. But I eventually lost the plot, and when we had some family issues, the novel died. (Edit: I just found out that I apparently still have these files. Three of them.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>WTF? (2007)<\/strong>: I don&#8217;t even\u00a0<em>remember<\/em> this novel; I just found the file and discovered my years\/genres were off. I at least know I wrote it, because I can hear myself in the words. I&#8217;m about to go read this. (I think it may have been a thriller\/body horror? There are clearly scientists, orphanages, and conspiracies. I had just turned 21 in 2007 &#8212; I drank <em>a lot<\/em>. I blame that for this lack of memory.)<!--more--><\/li>\n<li><strong>Romance (2008)<\/strong>: I actually didn&#8217;t think I wrote anything for NaNo 2008 &#8212; as you can see in my image &#8212; but I just found a document called &#8220;NaNoWriMo 2008.&#8221; It&#8217;s 3\/4 a page, and was obviously being set up as a Bad Girl\/Good Guy romance.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mystery (2009)<\/strong>: I made it 10,000 words (and a very complex mind-map) in before my computer died. In 2009, I learned why Baty always reminds Wrimos to backup, because I had not.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In 2010, I wrote a sci-fi story and managed to finish it just before we had to drive up to Wisconsin on a family emergency, and I&#8217;ve been incredibly pleased with it.<\/p>\n<p>In 2011, I wrote a differently flavored sci-fi story, and it was terrible (though fun to write) and finished way in advance because the Internet was out at my apartment and I had nothing better to do.<\/p>\n<p>Over the summer I wrote fantasy in both months of Camp NaNo (same story). I finished them, and then realized they were all wrong, that I had been approaching my plot from the wrong angle, and I needed to start again. Ugh.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Thing is, the success has nothing to do with the genre, and everything to do with the community.\u00a0<\/strong>We had also moved to Lawrence. Manhattan&#8217;s region simply wasn&#8217;t very organized; we chatted in the forums, but group meetings never seemed to get off the ground. I&#8217;m not even completely sure that we had an ML.<\/p>\n<p>Lawrence, on the other hand, is strangely well organized, and having the support and accountability that comes with a group makes all the difference.<\/p>\n<p>So this year, I&#8217;m tackling another sci-fi idea I had laying around: an near-future where rich people have hovering limos, which their\u00a0chauffeurs\u00a0race for money and prestige when they all congregate at big social events. It&#8217;s going to be cooler than it sounds.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m gonna do it with a cool group of writers. Because they&#8217;re awesome.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/msc-crashallthefeels.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5855\" src=\"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/msc-crashallthefeels.jpg\" alt=\"Crash: Feels\" width=\"500\" height=\"113\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, that title is completely a lie &#8212; but after taking a genre risk over the summer, I wanted to get back to something I feel relatively comfortable writing: hello, sci-fi. My first NaNoWriMo victory was a sci-fi story. In the years previous I had tried out early-20s ennui, romance, mystery, and urban fantasy. And [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[733],"class_list":["post-5850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanowrimo-2","tag-nanowrimo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}