NNWM 2025 Retrospective

Well, I completed my goal of having a post every single day for the entirety of November - so in that respect NaNoWriMo was a success!

In another way, it went worse than I expected. For one, some of the posts were incredibly small and lackluster - I think the one on Thanksgiving was literally a sentence long. For another, the format I settled on did not work for the story I was trying to tell, which gave way to a massive shift about two thirds of the way through. I have not gone through the entire story again, reading it with time separating me from my words, but I suspect that it is an uncomprehensible mess.

But I chose what I did for a reason. I think my strengths as a writer - or storyteller, anyway - lend themselves to characterization and plot. I like to think that I inhabit a character when I write from their point of view. I do not do a very good job of moment-to-moment detail, nor am I good at writing dialog. I'm sure all of these are skills that I could hone, and perhaps I'm not quite as bad as I think I am at some of these things - just as I'm sure as I'm not as good at some of the things I excel at.

I thought that an epistolary would be an interesting format. I've read the Screwtape Letters multiple times, as well as Dracula, and I find the format interesting. It allows for either an incredibly tight field of view - as you not only have to deal with the inherent unreliability of a single character, but also the potential the character is lying in their letters - but it can also lead to an interesting puzzle. The same event being viewed by multiple characters can lead to an interesting widening of the view. And if it is not obvious that the events being described are of the same thing, it could turn an otherwise straightforward plot if told from a more objective point of view into almost a mystery - asking the viewer to act as detective in piecing what actually happened together.

Of course, none of those are inherent to an epistolary - you can get most of the same effects from a limited third person point of view. But the epistolary removes the need to be incredibly descriptive in physical actions and focus on the effects or impact. The back-and-forth of dialog can be simplified, with the meaning in tact, as it's written form memory instead of being described in the moment.

I think the greatest strength of the epistolary, though, is the limitations it brings. Each letter or diary entry has to have a purpose, but does not have to have a set length. As I would be describing what occurred through a specific character's point of view, I can have the letter be more freeform and skip around chronologically - focusing on the most important things that happened first, and going back in time for the leadup - without getting too tired. I have the potential of finding a voice for a character, in many more ways - based on what kind of things they want to focus on in their own recollections to how they self-edit their words. And, as each letter has a purpose, it contains each entry. Technically, I don't think this is especially different from containing the action within a scene, but it feels different in my mind.

Unfortunately, I don't think I actually used any of those benefits. As I did not plan anything out beforehand, other than having a vague idea of the story I wished to tell, I did not have especially developed characters, at least for what I wanted. I tried to ignore the most important character to the story - the Chronicle - for as long as I could as I wanted to see what the story would like without his influence. And most importantly, the story I wanted to tell was just too big. I would need at least double the number of diary entries as I had, if not more, and I would need the flexibility to make some short, some long, some focused on a throwaway character that didn't matter, etc. The flexibility I wanted to use with the epistolary format did not mesh with how I chose to use the time afforded to me by November.

But, I did learn a lot about the story that I wanted to tell. The first is something that I can't go into detail about as it is likely to change - but I was surprised at some of the epiphanies I had about the story from the very first day. Likewise, by the second day I wanted to edit the first day so that I could make things mesh better. Perhaps if I were writing this story normally instead of as part of an event, I would have done that. Or perhaps it would have been better to just make a note for changes in the second draft.

The most important thing I learned, though, is that the Chronicle is necessary. A handful of letters and diary entries may be able to work on their own, but I am not one to pay much attention to dates or really take the time to understand what the difference in them means. Having connective tissue to add a few thoughts, and perhaps a quick explanation here or there, would have improved the letter-centric nature quite a lot. It also builds into the meta-narrative that I want to continue throughout this story - and others if I ever get that far. I had sacrified the meta-narrative for this project to see if it was necessary, and while it may not be, some aspects of the framing is.

I also saw quite a lot of parallels and foreshadowing that I don't think I fully intended coming out. I doubt they stood out to anyone reading the story, especially by the end, but I saw the seeds of something fun that I could build upon. And it should inform how I handle certain aspects in the future.

I do not know when I'll return to this project. There are quite a few things that I put on hold to do this, that I really want to get back to. But I did have fun, and I want to see if I can build on the ideas I had while writing, and execute on a lot of things better without the every-present deadline of the end of the month.

I just need to have some kind of pressure to keep working on it.

From the Beginning to Today

So, I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid and almost all of that came from wanting to make up and share stories with other people. This almost certainly comes from my dad - who did tell stories to me, which I later realized was basically freeform roleplaying, and had similar storytelling aspirations of his own. And when I first began writing, it was in a play-by-post forum specifically for Dungeons and Dragons. And I was not horrible at it.

The thing that I failed to realized until much later in my life is that I was not horrible at writing words that went along with a bunch of other people that were writing words that combined to tell a story. If you've never experienced play-by-post before, it is effectively a communal writing exercise, where everyone contributes their bit to tell a greater whole. If you've experienced tabletop roleplaying, it is still a very different experience. People have hours, if not days, to think of the perfect response, and spend so much more time describing how their character thinks, instead of pure action and reaction. Things are slower, but characters are more consistent. And, in a lot of ways, more constructed, less surprising, and - in my experience - less interesting.

I was under the assumption that I was a good writer. Or, at least, a good storyteller. The folly of youth, I suppose.

No, I was decent at coming up with a story. And okay at coming up with characters. But I was not good at meshing everything together. Put whatever I wrote onto an audience that may be receptive but isn't necessarily interested, and I could not grab that interest. There was no pizzaz.

I learned this when I was trying to tell something to my dad - the same dad who instilled this interest in the first place - over lunch. I picked up that he wasn't actually following along - no active listening cues or anything - and I just stopped. And never started again. And he didn't notice. I realized that, for all I cared about whatever I was doing, I was actually ignorable background noise. The things I cared about weren't actually important.

Now that may sound like I'm blaming my dad, or throwing shade on the idea that "a parent should care about their child's interest, because it's their child's interest" or whatever. And I'm not going to pretend that it didn't sting. But it was a valuable note to my life - that I need to make something worthwhile before anyone's going to care about it. That just having an idea or a story or a character is worthless if you can't execute on it.

Unfortunately, I'm a sensitive little bitch, so instead of putting things out into the world and "learning my craft" and evolving as I practiced, I kept everything private. I figured that I'd know when I was good enough and could finally make a breakthrough when that happened. But since I am constantly alternating between thinking everything I do is fantastic and everything I do is shit, I know that I am a horrible judge of my own quality.

This is why I'm writing publicly, even as I know the quality isn't there. I saw somewhere recently the sentiment of "if you do things poorly, no one will remember them; if you do things well, people will remember them." The writing equivalent of "only you remember your cringy moments from high school." So, there's really nothing keeping me from writing slop and posting it other than my own insecurities. No one's going to notice anyway. No one will pay attention.

And even as I grow frustrated at my writing over this NaNoWriMo, not going into as much depth as I want to, nor spending enough time on the edit to make words good, I am... satisfied. Proud, even? I've spent more time dedicated to writing than I have in a long time, which is likely not reflected in the sheer number of words coming out. I've spent more time on this site than I have in the prior decade that it's been up. I don't like the quality of the thing that I'm making right now, but I can see hundreds of distinct ways that I can improve it. And that brings a tear to my eye, I guess. That, finally, I can see the thing in myself that I like to see in other people - someone trying at something they care about.

Even though I suspect none of the people who this is directed toward will see this, a large part of why I've stuck with it is just because I did share the fact that I'm doing this publicly. And even though there weren't many words said, I still felt the support from the group that paid attention, and I feel like I can't let them down. Just a small pat on the back or a headpat or whatever, even if virtual, is keeping me going.

So, yeah, I guess I'm sticking with it. If A Thing's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Badly - definitely sticking with that second half so far.

NaNoWriMo

Finally, time to get that horrible introduction off the first post on the homepage.

The project I'm working on now, throughout the month of November, is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. I've participated in something similar in the past - creating a visual novel over a single month (I think it was February) - which was... successful in that I created a visual novel with a friend (who did the coding) and another (who did the art). It was not very good and is probably deleted from the internet for reasons I don't want to go into because it would reveal how long ago it was.

The idea behind NaNoWriMo is self-explanatory: to write a novel in a month. It's also a bit misleading.

The goals are a simple: write 50,000 words over the course of November. For those of you unaware of average page lengths and word lengths, I generally think of 300-350 words per page of a book, and about 100,000 words is a "standard" 300 page book. I typically read fantasy, which skews much longer, but those are averages I've seen.

So 50,000 words turns out to be about 150 pages of a printed book. Which is a lot to write in a month, but it's not really what I would consider a novel. Even John Scalzi, the most popular author I can think of that tends to write books on the shorter side (keep in mind my bias of preferring fantasy, with some sci-fi mixed in), is somewhere in the 200s at least.

But also, once you finish NaNoWriMo, you basically have a rough draft of a story, no where near an actual novel yet.

The actual point of NaNoWriMo, as I see it, is to force someone to keep writing regardless of the quality. To keep going forward, ignore editing, and just get the story onto page. That, at least in my own experience, is the hardest part of writing in the first place.

I tend to enjoy editing. In fact, most of the things that I've put on paper this month have had at least 2-3 editing passes as I write it to make it sound better (this may be hard to believe, and I'm with you on that). But there's still this inertia keeping me from starting on something entirely new, knowing that it's hard to know where to start and getting disgusted at the first few attempts to get words on paper. Refinement is fun, but creating is hard.

So now that we have the point of NaNoWriMo, I'll reveal that I don't actually care about the stated goals of the project. The non-profit that hosted/organized NaNoWriMo went bust earlier this year. "Why" is complicated for a few reasons, but is mostly boils down to a lack of funds and a huge backlash due to their stance on artificial intelligence's place in writing. I won't touch on the subject because I honestly don't care.

But, to take a step back, the purpose of NaNoWriMo is to keep writing, and that's why my own personal goal is to have a post out every day. As I am on the east coast time zone of the United States, I have yet to miss a day. I've gotten very close - one post this week was 5 minutes before midnight - but I've kept at it. If I manage to make my 30 posts in 30 days, regardless of where the story is or what quality that story is at, I will consider that a success.

The story I'm telling is something that's been percolating in my mind for a long time. It has endlessly evolved, incorporating new things and discarding others, but I generally have a handle on what I want. That being said, as early as Day 1 I learned something new/interesting about the story.

And more importantly, as early as Day 2, I wanted to go back to edit earlier bits to better fit with what I wrote after.

But that's not what NaNoWriMo is about. It's about getting a rough draft that I can then use as a base later on. And as long as I keep that in mind, I won't mind the slop.

Intro 2025

Intros start with names, so mine is CJ or - as I generally prefer - Siege. I've had it for the past 10 years, which is about as long as I've had this domain.

This site probably looks empty to any casual bypassers, but I assure you there is a veritable graveyard of failures just below the surface, out of view. I've tried to use this place as a repository for... well, my creativity. I've had dreams and passions and pretty much everything else, and I've abandoned them or gotten discouraged or just stopped for a variety of reasons. I take years' long breaks from doing what I want to do.

Perhaps, whenever I get bored or inspired enough, I'll go into more details. But this is an intro and I don't have time or space for that. I tend to talk too much, anyway, and no one needs that.

So go back to Baby Siege: I discovered I wanted to be an author when I was about 13. I had a path planned out to be a college professor or high school teacher, spending my dayjob doing something else I really enjoyed doing - basically teaching (any other way I try to say it like "sharing knowledge" makes it sound pretentious) - and writing stories during office hours or whatever else. That didn't come to pass for a variety of reasons.

Skimming over a lot of things, I'm much better at mathematics, sciences, and logic-adjacent stuff than I am at any kind of humanities. And perhaps one day, once again if bored or inspired, I can explore the pain of being good at something you find utterly boring and being bad at your passion. So I got a degree in an engineering I don't really care about, a job or career in tech largely working with data, code, and reporting, and the only outlet I have for the things I really want to spend my time on was tabletop roleplaying (think: Dungeons and Dragons). I'm kind of a problem player, and not a very good Game Master, so most of that has gone to the wayside for the sake of my friends.

Anyway, the tagline of this site has always been one of the most meaningful quotes I've come across. From Granny Weatherwax in Equal Rites - the third Discworld novel by Sir Terry Pratchett*: "If a Thing's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Badly."

My thoughts on the matter - which could fill an entire essay which, once again boredom or inspiration will surely strike to expand on - are that if the only reason you're doing a thing is because you're good at it, you're out there seeking acclaim or a pat on the back or something. If you're doing something despite being utterly shit at it, that you treasure the outcome even as your soul cries at the objective quality, it was something you really wanted to do. You powered through despite the entire world and reality telling you it wasn't worth it, and I think there's a very special beauty in that.

I apply this to everything in my life - to loving the amateurish attempts at beginners at anything creative, to the rookie mistakes of more analytical fields - be it games or professionally. And I get rewarded a lot of the time by watching them grow into a skill that they work hard to hone.

But I never apply it to myself.

I doubt that's going to change now - I have an issue with motivation in general and very likely have undiagnosed depression or bipolar disorder. But I am forcing myself to do things I'm uncomfortable with, because the tiny little Brain Siege that makes decisions is forcing the Meat Siege that actually does things to work toward making some kind of meaning in their life.

A new post will be coming up soon, ideally today, explaining my first (new) foray.

A few notes before I sign off:

1. When I said doing something solely because you're good at it is just an attempt at getting some kind of accolade, I don't want anyone thinking that they're a bad person because they do things they're good at. There are a lot of reasons to focus on things you're good at - from actually enjoying them, to wanting to help others, to being able to make money, to just because you want to.
2. I am non-binary and asexual, and likely aromantic as well. If any of these things are issues for you, fuck off. Bigotry sucks (especially when it's being targeted toward me), and I'm not going to deal with it.
3. I'm a cynical, sarcastic bitch - I find giving tells to my jokes to somewhat ruin them. This is a problem in a text-only medium. As an example, the parenthetical above is a joke: Bigotry sucks regardless of who it's targeted towards.

*This quote is not originally from Sir Terry Pratchett. He stole it from G. K. Chesterton. I learned this when I used this quote in an essay in a public speaking course. I also learned that another quote I used from Sir Terry Pratchett - "A lie can run around the world before the Truth can get its boots on." - was also paraphrased from... Sir Winston Churchill. I am American, which means I have no knowledge of history or culture or other nations, don't blame me.