Ouch. This is getting harder. Everything was flowing for a while there. For the first 15,000 words or so, the novel was practically writing itself. Plot arcs were fleshing themselves out even as I wrote them drawing inexorably to their conclusions, side-tracking just enough to put the brakes on things when it felt like I was moving ahead too quickly. Then pow, I find my protagonist acting uncharacteristically, the supporting cast and antagonists stilted and forced and contrived, and the pace just plain feeling wrong.

My National Novel Writing Month effort has gone from freely traipsing along, piling ideas and details into a fun little mixed salad into a strained effort to pitch more manure onto a steaming compost heap. I’m 17 days in to the challenge — write a 50,000 word novel starting November 1st and ending by December 1st — and I’m in serious need of a second wind. Going by a strict average-per-day word count, I’m 4,500 words in back at the moment, a staggering deficit at my recent rate of output.

So where does this leave me? Wait for lightning to strike? Trudge onward at whatever pace I can muster? I’m not ready to call it quits, but I’m certainly developing a greater appreciation for some of my favorite fiction writers.

A week ago, I joined thousands of other amateurs in writing one novel in one month. This is part of National Novel Writing Month, with the challenge being to write a 50,000-word work of fiction starting November 1st and finishing by the end of November 30th.

In some ways, it’s been a breeze. I chose a simple concept that I’m tremendously comfortable with, a knight-in-shining-armor version of my son that I use as a bedtime story. As a long-time D&D player and DM, and a part-time fan of fantasy fiction like the Shannara series, Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Conan, and a variety of lesser series and one-shots, I have a pretty broad set of plot hooks at my disposal to send my brave knight off on a variety of adventures.

The main problem so far has been structure and pacing. For the first sub-arc of the story, I just wasn’t sure when to make my transitions. Had the social obstacle in the village posed enough of a challenge? Had the protagonist spent enough time and effort on overcoming it? Too much? If too much, am I really going to go back and tighten it up now, what with the 1,667/words-per-day pace necessary to complete the challenge? Should I spend a couple of pages on building up a little sympathy for the bad-guy, or leave this one cut and dry? Had I sprinkled clichés on liberally enough to suit the simple, light-hearten tone I’m shooting for?

So far, so good, I suppose. I certainly have no intention at this point of showing my work to anybody before at least a first-pass edit. I’m taking the advice of veteran NaNoWriMo participants and resisting the urge to double-back and edit. November is for writing.

Cruising through Infosthetics the other day, I ran into The Whole Internet. This is a map of all 4,294,967,29 IPv4 addresses, broken down by owner, using a rather smooth image-scaling program that makes it quite navigable. Picked out in red are all the IP addresses listed in the Spamhaus XBL, in my opinion one of the more reputable blocklist clearing houses around.

My one criticism of this interface, of course, is that there’s no clear mechanism for centering on a particular IP other than manually clicking around until you find something close.

November is National Novel Writing Month, a magical time when a young man’s thoughts turn to cranking out about 1,667 words per calendar day. The mission is simple: starting November 1st, write a 50,000 word work of fiction, finishing before December 1st. The reward is simple: the intrinsic value of having done so.

Aside from the word count and the time frame, there are no rules to get all bent out of shape over. It doesn’t have to be a great literary work. It doesn’t have to be edited. It doesn’t have to be shown to strangers or even friends. It doesn’t even have to be any good. It just has to be at least 50,000 words written in November.

Personally, I’ve got a very rough idea of the characters, settings, and stories I’d like to pound out, though I haven’t done anything formal like writing up an outline. I expect to never show the output of my 2007 NaNoWriMo effort to anybody but the automated word-counter, but who knows?

Hat tip to Logtar, whose recent post reminded me about all this.

Edward Tufte described a sparkline, a term he coined, as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” They have been embraced by a number of information visualization buffs, and now a sparkline graph showing the weekly activity of Burrowowl.net appears next to the search tool. With two axes and shading, the following is all conveyed in a glance:

• Each bar’s height represents the quantity of article written to this site.
• Each bar’s color indicates the quantity of comments, darker bars representing more discussion, lighter bars representing less. The most recent week is set in red to draw attention to it.
• Each bar represents one week of posts.

No explicit scale is shown; all heights and colors are relative to the other data. Graphs of this sort are meant to be read and understood immediately, much like a natural word is more quickly-absorbed, understood, and put into context than an acronym or unfamiliar jargon. If you see a row of tall bars followed by a dip, it means that I was slow in posting during that period of time compared to normal. If you see a dark splot of bars amongst very light ones, those were times of more frequent discussion.

Hat tip to Information Aesthetics for calling my attention to this form of informational graphic and putting a name to them so I could look around for the proper tools, and hat tip to Sean McBride for writing the PHP that actually generates the graphic.

Currently I’m showing 26 weeks, half a year, though that may change. Sean McBride’s WordPress plugin can operate out of the box at daily, weekly, or monthly granularity, and is quite configurable.