I just finished watching episodes 8 and 9 of HBO’s The Leftovers, and something finally clicked. Yes, I know, I said I wasn’t going to watch more than 4 episodes, but I was intrigued by a television show (and a story) that does nothing but raise questions without ever answering them. Oh, that crack I made about Lost? Turns out, Leftovers producer Damon Lindelof did write for Lost. No wonder! Spoilers below if you haven’t seen the show yet. (I don’t recommend it, by the way. Unless the 10th and final episode of the season blows my mind, I just don’t get the point of this show.)

I suppose I should finally reveal the results of my July Camp NaNoWriMo experiment: Total failure. I was doing all right until things at work took a turn for the stressful, and then it became impossible to write in the evenings. I’m sure you can imagine that it’s hard to be creative when you’re totally drained. I tried to set myself up for success anyway, by changing my target word count from 50,000 to 15,000. (You can do that in the summer NaNoWriMos.) That goal was well within reach until things at work took a turn for the even-more-stressful and exhausting on top of it. So I wimped out and gave up. I ended up completing a little over 10,000 words.

I feel like there should be some sort of law against television shows (or the books they are based on, I guess) that only raise questions without giving any answers in the first four episodes of the series. I can handle two episodes of story without context. I could even go to three episodes without any context. But four? Nope. That’s too much. I should have a basic understanding of where The Leftovers is going by now. (I have talked before about my need to understand the goals of the characters early in a story.) But now I have lost faith in the writers. Didn’t we learn anything from Lost? They are clearly just making it up as they go.

It’s been a while since my last writing update, so I will now write one. Ha-ha. Get it? Write a writing update? So funny I am. Let’s see. Where was I? Hold on a moment while I read my last post from March. Oh yes, I was writing 50-100 word summaries of each scene that would be in Sovereignty. That did happen, sort of, but I never actually finished an outline that I felt comfortable with. There are still holes in the plot that I can’t fill in. Still, I wrote about 1,000 words of a new first chapter. Unfortunately I was not happy with it. I just can’t find a “hook” for that story. It remains tantalizingly out of reach.

FYI, I completed a 1000-word summary of Sovereignty, but I won’t post it here because it’s filled with spoilers, just in case it turns into a real book some day. It’s now abundantly clear that there is no place for my original story in the book. Not even as a side plot. One of the original driving forces for this book was: What if there was a culture of people who bred servants in the same way that we breed pets? The original main character was going to be one of those servants.

So yeah, somehow two whole months have disappeared and I haven’t done much writing. It’s actually more intimidating to try to revise existing manuscripts than it is to try to write new manuscripts. Anyway, in order to spark some positive momentum, I challenged myself to write a 100-word summary of the plot of The Sovereign of Tel. That probably sounds trivially simple, but for me to zoom that far out from the story and give such a super high-level overview of it is quite a challenge. I have tried to write “pitches” of my books before, but those only included the setup for the story. For this, I wanted the entire story arc from start to finish.

The first week after NaNoWriMo I had to force myself not to write a new story draft because it had become such a habit. The second week it was kind of a relief not to have to write anything, and that terrible story had finally left my brain. In the third week I was anxious to get back to planning or writing something, lest I fall into a not-writing habit. Then came the holidays and the end of the year, and I predictably fell out of the writing habit.

I didn’t understand much of anything that happened in the Christmas Special The Time of the Doctor, Matt Smith’s final episode as Dr. Who. I didn’t understand the story, I didn’t understand why he was carrying around a Cyberman head, I didn’t understand why the crack was back, I didn’t understand why there was a town called Christmas or why The Doctor was stuck there, I didn’t understand where the Church of the Holy Whatever with the soldiers came from, nothing, zip, zilch. It seemed like a completely random jumble of people, places, and concepts. Was any of that in the last half-season anywhere? I sure don’t remember it. I guess I wasn’t paying nearly enough attention.

This is an example of how to make nanowrimo harder. I won NaNoWriMo, barely. Scrivener said I had 50,140 words, but NaNoWriMo only gave me credit for 50,005 words, which I turned in on the night of the 30th. You might be surprised to know that I actually did “end” the story as well. I didn’t just stop writing.

Last night I once again approached my NaNoWriMo writing at about 9:00, which is the absolute latest I can possibly start writing with any expectation of getting anything done. Once again I stared at a blank document, not even looking at the previous day’s writing, wondering how on earth I could possibly come up with 1,667 words to write of a story that has no outline. Not just 1,667 words either. I actually need slightly more than 2,000 words a day to catch up again.