Author Chat: Badrat

For this Author Chat we talk with NaNoWriMo veteran BadRat, who has missed one NaNoWriMo in the last nine years - and shares her path to NaNoWriMo longevity (apparently it isn't about writing lots of words all at once - who knew?). In lieu of a profile, Badrat instead supplies her own pep talk on why you should be doing NaNoWriMo.

We would love to hear from other WriMos who would like to participate in an author chat. We welcome everyone, old hands and first timers alike.

Matt Tobin
Aeon Timeline Developer

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NaNoWriMo Pep Talk

Not actual likeness.

NaNoWriMo is the one of best ways I know to find out what sort of writer you are. If you manage to write 50,000 words, there’s going to be a lot of information in there about what you really want to write, what you do well and what really drives you nuts because it’s so hard. What your writing habits are, or aren’t. What’s stopping you. What’s starting you.

The first thing it showed me was that my comfort zone wasn’t nearly big enough, that there was enough oxygen to breathe while toiling up to 50,000 words. I found that while I could write dialogue that really excited me, I couldn’t find the story that strung the voices together. Then I found Scrivener, which gave me a way to establish some way to work with what until then had been either a single huge file that I couldn’t navigate in, or a flock of little files that refused to speak to each other. This year, I found Aeon Timeline, which began to establish something like a set of blueprints to refer to, so I can finally stop building story structures that won’t stand up, that have no handicapped access or adequate ventilation.

I discovered there are people all over the world willing to dedicate their time and energy for a whole month just to write a novel, and that seemed an appropriate activity, since I’m always reading novels and being surprised there are so many new good ones. I discovered a bunch of people in Oregon, Eugene and Springfield specifically, who were willing to talk, and encourage, and generally make November one rocking party, the kind that keeps me coming back year after year.

How many years have you done NaNoWriMo?

I did my first NaNo in 2005, a November when we unexpectedly had one month to move from the over full three bedroom house. I looked around at the chaos and said, what would make this even crazier? The answer of course was, do NaNoWriMo. I won that year, and participated every year since except one, when I decided to spend the time continuing to revise a promising manuscript (still revising, but making progress). I lost one NaNo attempting an idea with no legs and have a total of six wins so far.

What are you writing for NaNoWriMo this year?

I'm going to focus on filling in a section of what has turned into a three novel project, all still a long way from completion. The story starts in San Francisco in 1986, and involves strange events that may or may not be genuinely occult phenomena, in a city that is on the brink of several disasters (AIDS, earthquake, Oakland Hills fire). The project follows the characters to Springfield, Oregon, at the turn of the century, then picks up in 2012, and I want to write a back story with events not slated for the three novels.

Describe your writing environment.

Scrivener. I tell people, if you're not using Scrivener, you're working too hard. Early bird, not night owl. I tend to try to write a little more than the necessary quota every day, and I've always finished early. It's about discipline. I want to come out of November with a stronger daily routine, which isn't nourished by binge writing. This year I also have Aeon to lean on, and I expect to lean heavily.

How are you planning to use Aeon Timeline?

I think I'm going to be using Aeon to 'pin' the structure as it appears during writing, rather than using it to plan in advance. What I mean is something like this: write a couple of scenes, then 'pin' them into the timeline. Look at the space before, the space after. Ideas come. Write some more. See what these events look like in relation to the others. Some of them look like a separate arc, so I create one. It's dynamic, responsive. Back and forth between the writing and the mapping. Keeping things visible.

How has Aeon helped you with past projects?

Aeon is actually one of those round floaty things people throw to drowning sailors. My huge, floundering writing project had one fixed date, Walpurgis Night in 1986, but everything else I'd written was floating aimlessly around this lonely buoy. So I established a floating week calendar with May 1, 1986, as zero, and started distributing all the events I'd written around that fixed point. Suddenly I was starting to have a clear picture of the sequence, and it's problems. When I added a character arc with all the characters birthdays it solved a sequencing puzzle that had been driving me nuts, because characters had to encounter the zero date at a particular age, and now I could drag the birthdays around until the sequence made sense.

I don't think in dates, I think in relative relationships, so adding events 'several days' or 'a week' later or earlier than other events made perfect sense to me, because that's how I think when I write. The floating week calendar made it possible to model this visually for the first time, and because I built it around an actual date, I can convert the relational calendar into one with actual dates any time I want. Or not. This kind of floating works for me.

What are you hoping to see added to Aeon Timeline in the future?

Number one is user defined relationships that move beyond "participant" and "observer." "Affected by" would be useful, also "in use" for magical implements, murder weapons, etc.

[MT: Flexibility is always a good thing. Rather than adding more hard-coded relationships, my plan is to allow users to customise the relationships themselves in a future version.]

Any screenshots of your timeline that you would like to share?

I would really like to share a timeline I constructed to test the custom calendar, just because it blew me away to see that I could really model a calendar that has four distinct time sequences. The 'story' framework is a world that was changed by the arrival of the mythical Snake, so there's Before Snake, and Era of Snake, corresponding to BC and AD. Then a hundred years into Era of Snake time starts over with the Apotheosis of the Snake, a magical era lasting a single year. (It's a bit squished visually on the main time line, but the events in the corresponding arc should make it clear it all takes place in a single year). The followers of Snake are defeated at the end of this year, causing them to reset the calendar again at one, going on post-snake.

Thank you

My thanks again to Badrat for participating in our author chat.

I will post another Author Chat shortly - why not volunteer and it could be you!

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