Skip to main content

Research and NaNo-prep

I'm getting ready to pull things together for this year's NaNoWriMo, and I'm trying to go about my research in a little bit more of an organized way.  I have a tendency to write until I come across something that I don't know (what kind of reference would a person born in 1920 recognize?  Did the Inca have buildings with doors?), stop writing, and then get into a black hole of research.  I have a bad habit of "wiki-hopping", where I go to one page on Wikipedia, which leads to another link that looks interesting, to another link...Next thing you know, I have twenty tabs open and I've suddenly started reading about Sing a Song of Sixpence.

I've mentioned that I have a germ of an idea, and this is what I'm planning to work on for NaNoWriMo this year.  So far, I've written a of vignettes that are giving me a great idea of what my characters are like, which has been immensely helpful.  It's also helping me figure out what questions I need to answer to make me comfortable with the world I'm building.  Coming up with a list of questions has been an easy way to help me organize what I need to figure out, and will hopefully keep me from getting lost along the way.

I'm also going back to a process I used in college, and drafting my NaNoWriMo longhand.  My college required every senior to write a thesis in order to graduate, in addition to whatever classes they were taking.  It was my first experience with writing a paper that long, or that involved that much research, and I found that one of the best ways to force myself to edit along the way was to write out my first draft by hand, and then type it up later.  I still have the binder with all of the pages I drafted, and it's an interesting exercise to read not only the original ideas I had, but also how excited I was when I was writing them.  My handwriting changes dramatically when I'm on a roll, and when I'm struggling to get the words out, my handwriting becomes very precise.

I'm curious how my research plan will work, and how soon my cunning plans will fall apart.  That is one of the things I've come to terms with as I get older - that whole saying about "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry"?  It's a saying for a reason.

Progress report:  I'm including research in my "what have you done today" count, and I've still managed six out of the last seven days.  I feel good about my progress, even if it means that I spent some times reading a page or two on the history of written language or write a few lines in a vignette that will never see the light of day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wanna Hear Me Talk?

I mentioned in my last post, but now I'm doing the official promotional thing. I'm going to be doing a couple of presentations at the Flights of Foundry  convention next weekend! Specifically, I'll be doing a game demo for Rolling Realms  on Saturday, September 28 at 1pm Pacific. On Sunday, September 29 at 3pm Pacific, I'll be doing a panel presentation on copyright and public domain basics; finally, also on Sunday, September 29 at 5pm, I'll be on a panel sharing my handwork (specifically my crochet, cross stitch, and blackwork) with a few other fantastic people. This is my first time doing this kind of presentation, and so I'm a wee bit nervous. Still, I'm super excited, and the fact that it's all online means that I'll at least be in my home, and the cats may or may not make an appearance on camera. So! If you're interested in what's looking to be a fabulous online convention (that's FREE!), come join us next weekend!

Calm Your Mind with Needle and Thread

 I was fortunate enough to be able to host a workshop at GeekGirlCon last weekend, which went extremely well. My friend Erin was in town for the convention and was kind enough to co-host the workshop with me, which worked wonderfully because she was able to answer some questions that I didn't know how to answer, and also keep us on time (she's a professor, so she's experienced with dealing with classrooms full of people). I thought it would be a good idea, for my own benefit if nothing else, to document the first part of the workshop, which was a talk about embroidery and mental health. I've made the PowerPoint and list of resources available on a separate page of this blog ( here ). I don't know about you, but the last few years have not been especially kind to my mental or emotional health. I discovered early on in the pandemic that going back to something I learned when I was a child, cross stitch, was something that could help ease my anxiety and give me somethi...

Hope is a Four-Letter Word

I've been bouncing around with this for the last few weeks, ever since I read a couple of quotes from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals  by Oliver Burkeman. The book overall had some interesting ideas about reframing the idea of trying to get everything done. Even though there were a couple of things that made it clear the author was not approaching things with an eye toward neurodivergence (his discussion of distraction, for example, only talks about the "choice" to be distracted, and not how some people's brains simply don't focus the same way others' do), I was feeling generally positively toward the book until I got to the last chapter, and read this: "Hope is supposed to be 'our beacon in the dark,' [environmentalist Derrick] Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope  for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or ...