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Gut-Wrenching Romance

23 Jan

This weekend my boss went to Laser Quest with his ten year old son. That’s a weird way to start a blog post about romance, but there it is.

(Fun fact–my first romance novel was inspired by something my boss said.)

The romance doesn’t come from my boss, or his son, or even Laser Quest, really. But those things spurred my thinking.

I’ve played laser tag exactly once in my life. It was a snowy, winter evening in Colorado, and I was a teenager.  A lovelorn teenager, as was typical for me in that time of my life. I don’t remember the game very much. It’s all a blur of shadows and neon, pretzels and Pepsi.

What I do remember is the ride home.

I sat in the back seat. The object of my (at the time) eternal love and devotion sat in the seat directly in front of me. I could see the way his neck sloped into the collar of his jacket, the fringe of blonde hair, his freckles. All of this, so close, just six inches of foam and a million miles away.

Right before I started high school my parents moved to the middle of nowhere. This meant that any kind of activity that involved driving into ‘the city’ inevitably entailed a long car ride, half an hour at least. Throw in snow, and a bunch of teenagers happy to be away from home, and the drive can easily streeeeeetch out.

At some point during this drive, and don’t ask me how because for the life of me I cannot remember, my hand wound up on his shoulder, and his hand wound up on mine.

That’s it, folks.

But for a girl full of butterflies and self-doubt like myself, that touch was a revelation. I survived on the memory of that touch for months, because after that, affection was not very forthcoming from that particular arena. It was the MO of our interactions, from where I stood. A dance that I won’t describe here, and now.

So there I was, this morning, eleven years after the fact, folding hospital gowns, thinking about how cute it was that my boss played laser tag (and schooled the younger kids, apparently) and wham, this memory hits and for a moment I am breathless. I pause. I look around, and consciously reorient myself. Because the emotions attached to that memory were life and death, end of the world stuff.

And isn’t that what being a teenager is about?

I’m revising my YA fantasy novel right now. As I recently told a friend I need more Bad Guy, more Self-Sabotage, and more Romance.

I need more of what I felt, remembering that long winter drive. I need the truth of it, injected into my character’s relationships. And maybe, I’ll let Sydney get what she wants.

At least, for a little while.

Our work needs these intense emotional experiences. Have you been working on anything lately that forces you to face these deeper, possibly buried, emotions?

Photo used under creative commons license from kreg.steppe

 
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Posted by on January 23, 2012 in discovery, writing

 

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From Idea to Story: Thoughts and Exercises

12 Jan

This post was inspired by my new Tumblr, where I’ll be throwing things that inspire me. If you want a peek inside my brain hole, feel free to click on over.

Creative people are often asked where they get their ideas from. I think anyone who has been writing for a while will know what a strange question this is, though I admit to having asked the same thing myself a few times. The question usually isn’t–where do the ideas come from? It’s more, how do I use these ideas, and make them more than snippets? How do I flesh this scrap out, build it into something that will move people, delight people, intrigue and excite people?

JK Rowling said she had the first bits of her ideas about Harry Potter when she was on a long train ride. She didn’t have any pen or paper with her, and so she was forced to mull these ideas over in her head, stringing things together for hours on end without the benefit of being able to put anything down in black and white. Her method, whether by intention or because of circumstance, was essentially daydreaming. Prolonged periods of daydreaming. And I think that is the root of the creative process. We have to give ourselves room to dream. And then we have to anchor those dreams to some kind of reality.

So how did this wildly successful author come up with her ideas? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she took them and created a world out of them. And there are at least as many ways to do this as there are authors. I’m still finding my method, that tried-and-true process that works every time.

I think I’m on a wild goose chase. I’m sure as I grow both as a writer and as a person, what works fr me will change. But that’s good! It forces me to try new things, and occasionally stumble upon something new. And the whole point of being alive is to learn, to live, to grow.

Here are a few things that work for me right now. Who knows? Maybe they’ll spur something in you, too.

Creating Characters From People

It’s cheating. I know. But it’s the best and worst kind of cheating there is. We all know people with idiosyncrasies that drive us up the wall, or make us want to study them like animals in a lab. Or something like that. And when it comes to creating believable, interesting characters you could do a whole lot worse than picking them from the ripe field that is your life.

Now, I’m not recommending trying to put Dad into your story whole cloth. That won’t work. It can’t. Human beings are so intricate and complicated that any facsimile we try to create will inevitably come out forced. Instead, try inserting Dad’s laconic nature into the best friend of your main character. Or his love of puzzles into the villain. In doing this, you inject something familiar into this character. You’ll know, from experience, how this aspect of a personality works, and it will be easier to conjecture. And by using just one piece of the person, you avoid the “OMG you put me in your book and I’m a jerk! What do you think of me?” problem.

Who is This Going to Hurt Most?

So you’ve got this awesome idea for a world where people literally share one heart, and if they don’t find their mate before a certain age they start to die. Great. Now, you go to choose a main character and–you find the middle-aged woman comfortably married with three children who have been linked with their mates since birth. Hmm…I could think of a couple of ways you could use this woman, but I don’t think she’s MC material for this story.

How about the CEO of a company in charge of finding people’s mates? If he fails, well, there goes his commission! Again, not a strong candidate.

Or how about the girl who’s fallen in love with her best friend, who gets murdered. And then she finds out her mate is the guy responsible for the murder. Now this has potential.

Who does your idea hurt? How can you make it hurt worse? I’ve mentioned this here before, and it applies as much today as it did a hundred years ago and will a hundred years in the future–put your character in a tree and throw rocks at them. But before you get them up there, find the character who has trouble climbing trees, find the character with thin skin, the character scared of heights and projectiles. The connections will start coming, growing like sinews between pieces of your ideas until you have something vaguely story shaped.

Randomize

Then, if you get really stuck, do something crazy. This is an exercise borrowed and tweaked from Holly Lisle (who has a whole, comprehensive course about how to take an idea and make it into a book).

Take a magazine. Rip out a bunch of pictures. Scatter them over your floor. Start throwing things at your impromptu collage. A penny will do. Wherever that penny lands, let that inform your next scene.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a far-future hard SF. I have no experience in this genre, so excuse any unintentional foot-in-mouthing I may commit. You’ve just massacred an issue of Vogue, so you have a spread of watch ads, fashion shoots, and the like. Your penny lands on this*:

Congratulations! Your characters have just discovered a new alien race! Or perhaps that trunk she’s sitting on contains the WMD your hero will have to wrest from the grips of evil. Or this is the villain disguised as your hero’s long-lost sister, dropping in for a none too friendly visit. There are a dozen ways you can take this particular picture, easy, and this picture is pretty…well, boring.

The ideas are everywhere. It’s the connective fibers that are harder to come by.

*photo ripped shamelessly from the internets.

Also, I’m not affiliated with anyone. Any links are free from outside influence.

 
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Posted by on January 12, 2012 in creating, planning, writing

 

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First Publication! And Happy New Year!

31 Dec

Yeesh. It’s been nearly a month since I last posted, and I don’t even have NaNoWriMo to blame.

All that aside, I have excellent news! My short story “The Nightmare Eater” has been published and released by The Colored Lens. You can download it and read it (among several other surely excellent stories) here.

This is my first official publication! I have another story coming out early next year, but this one…dang. It’s a cool feeling. Like, very shiny and fluttery. It is the first step on my path to total world dominion! (Or a publishing deal that will keep me in fish&chips and gin for the rest of my natural life.)It’s nice to be going into 2012 with a notch in my belt. I think it bodes well for the year.

This is a big one, guys. If everything goes according to our plans, by this time next year I will be writing from a tiny apartment somewhere in Japan. Caleb will be doing what he loves, and I will have more time than ever to devote to that whole fish&chips aspiration. With the new year comes the expectation of resolutions. I’m personally not a fan of resolutions, as I see them more like ongoing actions than things to be achieved. Which is good and all, but I’m much better at getting things accomplished when I have goals. Do XYZ by 123, or x number of times per month/week/year.

(Confession: When I was younger, probably between the ages of 11 and 16, one recurring resolution that I dutifully scrawled in my diary was :Be nicer. I have since abandoned that resolution. Now, pardon me while I eat your face.)

But goals! I do well with goals. And I’ve got a few good ones lined up for the coming twelve months, a few of which I’ll share with you here.

  • Revise “The Absinthe Gang” and start querying editors.
  • Learn enough conversational Japanese to get by.
  • Use the perfumist and herbalist classes I signed up for.
  • Write a short story using some of what I learned in aforementioned classes.
  • Keep track of my reading. I’m thinking I’ll either utilize GoodReads more, or keep a spreadsheet.

There are more, because I’m nothing if not ambitious. I’m going into 2012 focused on my writing and on Japan, which is similar to where I was last year. Only now I’ve been through ClarionWest, I have my first publishing cred with another in the works, and Caleb has applied to JET (!). It’s interesting, seeing things move forward like this. For a while, aspects of my life felt stationary. Writing, for example. After letting my mad skillz lie fallow for several years, it took a while for me to get back to where I’d been, and then another long while before I was anywhere decent. I know I still have a long way to go, and that I will always find something new to learn, but it is crazy heartening to see how far I’ve come.

I’m not the only one kicking ass and taking names. Click here to check out fellow CW alum Jenni’s post on the awesomeness that is my class of ClarionWest. Mega fist bump!

How have you progressed this last year? What goals are you setting for the coming year?

Photo used under creative commons license from: graciepoo

 
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Posted by on December 31, 2011 in career, discovery, planning

 

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The Pot of Gold at the End of the WriMo

03 Dec

Wow. It’s December. 32 days ago, it felt like this month would never get here, and now that I’ve just flipped over my calendars, it seems like November was little more than a speeding blur. One more Thanksgiving cooked and eaten, one more Black Friday assiduously avoided…one more NaNoWriMo over and done.

And this year, for me, it actually is done.

Both of the books I’ve written during this mad dash have ended up taking me through December and into January to finish. (Zero draft, of course.) With all the writing I do anyway, the 50k word goal felt too easy. NaNoWriMo is supposed to be a challenge, and for me, writing a complete novel would be that level of challenge.

(This is not to say NaNo has never been challenging, oh no. That first year I didn’t think I was going to make it. I had one hair-raising weekend that, for my unseasoned fingers, felt like aLOTof writing. Now, the 8k word weekend just feels like…well, a lot of writing. No emphasis.)

In that challenge, I technically failed. The Absinthe Gang/Toulouse was not finished until approximately 7 pm on December 1st.

And the heavens quailed.

I could have done things differently. I could have taken fewer days off writing. I could have bought Freedom and turned my internet off. I could have slept less. But I didn’t, and I’m okay with that. In fact, I am very happy. There were a few times this past month where I got very close to quitting. Writing is hard, yo! But through a combination of husbandly pep talks and dogged persistence I broke through, and found my way to the end.

Not the perfect ending. That’s what January is for. But an ending, nonetheless. And that, I think, is the first step towards being a writer, a pro. Finishing.

Because you can’t edit a blank page.

How was your November?

Total wordcount: 88,212

Excerpt:

Normal. Everything felt normal.

Except that she was trembling, that her stomach was gripped in a series of knots even a sailor wouldn’t be able to unwind, that she was still clutching Aunt Hazel’s book and that her face hurt as if someone had taken a meat tenderizer to it. Someone had, in a way. She took a step toward Mahinder. He didn’t respond. She took another step.

He moaned and curled into a ball, his face hidden in his arms.

She dropped the book and ran to his side.

“Mahinder?” She knelt beside him, touched his shoulder. “Are you okay? Please be okay. I didn’t—“

 

Photo used under creative commons license from ]babi]’s

 
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Posted by on December 3, 2011 in NaNoWriMo, writing

 

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I am a turtle…with jetpacks

28 Nov


Including today, there are three days left inside the window of NaNoWriMo. I ran into a fellow NaNoer at a coffee shop yesterday, who intended to write 10,000 words before he went home. This is the time when that kind of mad creation comes to the forefront, with writers who’ve been behind for days (or weeks) hook up an intravenous coffee drip and bust out the Visine and the plot twists.

I do not count myself in this camp. That kind of burst writing might work for some, but I can’t begin to fathom the process: going from not writing at all, or hardly at all, only to throw yourself at a ten thousand word day seems like some special kind of torture.

I am a turtle. On rollerskates. With a jetpack. That is to say, I like to go at a steady rate, one day after another, until I get to the end. My rate for this book has been fast, even for me, but regular. I work best with habits. Coffee (or tea if I’m feeling wild), cup of water, chapstick, Pandora, headphones, a seat at a table where I can see all my enemies the people in the coffee shop. This is my ideal. Not the only time I can write, but I think my most productive times.

I have a friend who has written a couple screenplays, but hasn’t sat down to write in quite some time. He says getting past that initial hurdle is the hardest part. Once he gets the ball rolling, sitting down to write becomes another part of the day–a habit–but until then nary a word is expressed via type. And I tell him, every time we talk about writing, that consistency is key.

You hear it pretty much wherever you go looking for writing advice: Write every day. Give yourself a time, a setting, and get some words down. It could be 100, or 1,000 or 10. The act of writing is self-propagating. When you write a few word, the next few tumble out. When you sit down at your desk for ten minutes, you find yourself writing for twelve. And then fifteen. And after a month, or a year, or whatever it needs to be, you have yourself a novel, or a short story, or a memoir, or a damn good exercise that will inform future writing.

I use NaNoWriMo as a tool, an extra incentive to get my ass securely in chair and work towards a goal, utilizing a month’s worth of community and outside pressure to achieve it. Note that extra. Because when it’s not November, the ass is still in the chair. The writing is still getting done. And I think that is so, so important, regardless of whether you’re a burst writer or a turtle. (Jetpacks optional.)

So try this, in December and beyond into that shiny new year: Give yourself time, and space, to create. Whether it’s writing, or painting, or underwater basket weaving, set aside a time either every day, or once a week, when you can devote say…ten minutes to your endeavor. And then keep doing that. Put it in your calendar. Send yourself an email alert. Tell everyone what your intentions are.(Peer pressure is powerful. Haven’t you seen the after-school specials?) Be unabashedly, rabidly jealous of that time, even if it’s only ten minutes. No, especially if. Those are your minutes. Make something beautiful happen.

Any tips and tricks for getting in the habit of creating?

And here’s a nice post from fellow CW alum about the power of writing with others.

Total word count: 78,112

Today’s words: zed (but yesterday was a healthy 3.5k)

Excerpt from yesterday:

“It runs in the family. Didn’t you know that crazy’s in the blood?” Gunshot girl shoved Garland away from Sydney. “You owe us a new flask.”

“And a bottle of vodka,” Alan said.

“What’s going on?” Noah stepped up, Bryan at his shoulder. Both looked just as ready to hit someone, as they were to make peace.

“Your whack job sister ruined my flask.” Alan threw the bent silver container at Bryan. It hit his chest and clattered to the floor. Drops of liquid darkened Bryan’s embroidered shirt. The crowd around them started to move back. Bryan looked down and nudged the flask with his toe. Then he plucked at his shirt and sniffed the damp spots. He raised his eyebrow at Alan.

“No outside food or drinks,” he said. “You should go, before I kick you out.”

“You can’t kick me out.” Alan’s voice was shrill. “Who do you think you are?”

“You should go.” The voice came from behind Sydney. Kenneth pushed her and Bryan gently out of the way and stood in front of Alan and his friends.

“What are you, her dad?” Alan sneered, but he stepped back.

“I’m giving you to the count of three, and then we’ll get the police involved.” Kenneth crossed his arms. “One…”

“You can’t threaten me.”

“Two…”

“Come on, Alan.” Gunshot girl pulled on Alan’s shirt. He shrugged her off.

“Three.”

 

Photo used under creative commons license from rebelwriterX.

 
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Posted by on November 28, 2011 in NaNoWriMo, writing

 

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NaNo Day 11: Running on caffeine flavored steam

11 Nov

First off, Happy Veteran’s Day! A great big salute to the men and women who’ve given their time and their lives to keep this country safe. I may not agree with the government, but I agree with the sentiment.

*photo used under Creative Commons License from carbonated

Despite my rather upbeat post a few days ago, I must admit–this is getting hard. There have been a few moments of pure, sweet pleasure during the writing sessions, but overall I feel a bit like I’ve been pulling teeth. Well, maybe not that bad. I imagine if I was pulling teeth there would be a lot more screaming.

I’m pushing forward through the awkward scenes, keeping as close a hold on the string that connects my novel as possible, while trying to remember to touch back on my various subplots from time to time. I think my main concerns lie within the basic structure of my book.

I’m writing a YA urban fantasy novel. For those not hip with the lit-lingo I’ll break it down. The book is geared toward 14 to 17 year olds. It’s set in a fictional city based loosely on Portland, in a world where magic is real, but not accepted as such. Now, the issue I’m running into is this: I’m writing the book on a day-to-day basis. What I mean is, the writing follows the main character closely through every day. I often have several scenes spread out over the course of a single day. I’m almost halfway through writing the book and only six days have passed in book time. I’m concerned that things are moving too slow. I’m worried I’m writing scenes no one will want to read. I think every scene has a specific and important purpose, but…I’m not sure.

I’ve read plenty of YA books that follow similar setups, and I keep reminding myself of the fact. The Espressologist by Kristina Springer comes to mind. The book takes place over the course of…two weeks? Maybe three. I think The Devouring by Simon Holt covered a pretty limited timeline, too, barring the prologue. Still, I worry. I fret. I…other words I can’t think of right now. But it’s NaNo! And I soldier forth.

Any other short timeline examples I can reference?

Today’s word count: 3,208 (I’m tired….)

Overall word count: 33,335

Today’s tiny excerpt, culled from the very end of my writing:

“Ooh, got something fancy planned for Hallowe’en?” Garland wiggled her hips, as if she couldn’t contain her excitement. Sydney felt herself smiling—just a little. A smile that dissipated when she felt Mahinder’s eyes on her, staring and calculating.

“Just stocking up,” Sydney said. “And it’s called Samhain, not Hallowe’en.”

“If you’re not a witch,” Mahinder said, leaning forward, “then it’s called Hallowe’en.”

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2011 in NaNoWriMo, writing

 

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Welcome to Week Two

08 Nov

What is it about great big goals and getting sick that make them so compatible? Is it the added stress one takes on? Or perhaps a little kick in the butt to remind one to be humble? Either way, I’m kind of tired of it.

Around the end of week one of my ClarionWest expedition I got super sick. (Too sick to be as nice and charming around Connie Willis and Neil Gaiman as I wanted to be. *pout*) I was tired out from not getting enough sleep, drained from being apart from my home and thrown into this new environment, and probably reaping all the combined stress that I’d been carrying around ever since…well, since I sent my application, actually.

Now, here we are at the end of week one of 2011 NaNoWriMo and I’m sick. Not as bad as that CW experience, but then the circumstances aren’t as extreme, either. (Plus, I don’t think I’m as sick as I’m going to get, so there is still time!) Despite the sore throat, persistent headache and weird hollow feeling in the back of my neck, though, I am still on track to hit my self-imposed NaNo goal. And with one hundred words to spare!

You hear a lot about week two in the NaNo community. There’s this kind of dreadful, dark cloud that hangs over everything. This is the point where the honeymoon generally comes to an end. Characters who were at one point exciting and new become boring and predictable. Settings that once shined with an exotic glamour become trite and dull. Plots that were as twisty as a sailor’s knot look more like flat rope. This, they say, is where it starts to get hard.

And, while I think there’s certainly some truth to that (oh, stupid, stupid mental institute scene), I think the opposite can happen, too. This is where you start really getting to know your characters. Quirks emerge that you couldn’t have planned on. They turn a phrase that is so perfect it seems kind of amazing that you wrote it. This is when you can see that your knotty plot really was a bit flat–and how to fix it. The moments that start happening in week two are kind of magical, but its magic that has come from planting all those lovely little plot and character and setting seeds, and then weeding and tending them so you can watch something green pop through your word dirt.

Then, in December, or January, or twenty years from now, you can come back, brush off the dirt, and keep all those lovely verdigris pieces that were so painful to find amidst the dull, the predictable, and the annoying.

What I’m trying to say here is that week two doesn’t have to be horrible. Once I started giving my story some rope to wander off on, it started pulling me along right behind it. Cut your characters some slack. Throw them into a hard situation. Now is the time to break out the pressure cooker and watch them sweat. Because as we all know, sweaty people are major-interesting!

No…wait…what I mean is: Story is Conflict. Make things hard, and I’m willing to bet they’ll be fun.

Also, if you’re starting to feel sick, take some vitamins and a day off. In the long run, it’ll be worth it.

Current Daily Word Count: 3,263

Current Total Word Count: 22,505

Excerpt from today’s writing:

“Need a hand?” He called out when she saw him. He had a wide, even stride, dark blonde hair, and looked to be about Mom’s age. Sydney was about to tell him to piss off when Mom got out of the car. She was smiling, and she’d wiped the trails of mascara off her cheeks.

“It won’t start,” Mom said as the guy got closer.

“Maybe I can help,” he said, returning her smile with a flash of his own pearly whites. Sydney had the feeling they were in the start of a bad horror movie. Broken down car, outside of a mental institute, some strange man offering to help. Next thing, he’d be drugging Mom and chasing Bryan down with a chainsaw. Sydney, of course, would be the brave heroine who escapes the madman in order to alert the police, only to be stalked by him—and the memories or her poor, slain family—through the rest of the movie.

Sydney gave the guy her best polite smile and moved out of the way so he could join Bryan under the hood.

 
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Posted by on November 8, 2011 in NaNoWriMo, writing

 

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NaNoWriMo, Day the Third (and kittens)

03 Nov

The third day of NaNoWriMo is drawing to a close. The sun has gone down, the pajamas have come on, and the laptop is (almost) ready to be put away.

So far this year I have stayed true to my goal of attending massive amounts of write-ins, clocking in at three this evening. I have, technically, been to a write-in every day. The first was, of course, HallowNaNoWeen, which you all know about. Yesterday I arrived late to a write-in at a coffee, shop, and left early, having been drawn-and-quartered by a full day of work and an hour stuck on I-5. (Curse you traffic gods!) So that particular outing was less than enormously fruitful, and I ended yesterday being more than 1000 words behind my daily goal.

All of which, and more, was made up for tonight. Tonight, I was introduced to the concept of Word Wars. Oh, hells yes.

A word war is the following challenge: write as many words as you can in ten (or five, or thirteen, or 657) minutes. The person with the most words at the end wins some kind of prize. Maybe a keychain, maybe a rubber ducky, maybe a kiss from a bright young filly. Whatever. I understand that for some people this could result in massive performance anxiety and a complete inability to write more than “Kill me, please”. But for others, the pressure and the competitive nature is like a fire being lit under one’s posterior.

I think I fall somewhere in between. I didn’t do great, in terms of wordcount when compared to the other writers in the room. (Of which there were 30. Way to go Eastside!) But I think without those little sprints, I would not have reached my wordcount today. I spent a good portion of the morning, and most of the evening, bemoaning (silently) how much father I had to go if I wanted to keep on track. It was massive. Monumental. Impossible to scale.

Depressing.

And utterly conquered.

In fact, I came out 300 words ahead today, and what’s more, is that I’m pretty effing happy with them.

Okay, except for that scene with the alligator and the cotton candy machine. I don’t know where that came.

Day three daily wordcount: 3912

Day three total wordcount: 9897 (I’m saving the big 10k for tomorrow.) (Yes, I know it’s my day off. That will make it feel like I accomplished something.)

Day three excerpt:

“I should have done something,” he said. “I knew he was pissed about…” He waved his hand in front of him.

“About Juniper?”

Bryan shrugged.

“He likes her, doesn’t he.”

Another shrug, and then silence, except for Garland and the woman in the back room. A satin cape in extra large? Garland said she would check, but they might have sold out already.

KITTENS! Used under creative commons license from: sm3287, Tess Aquarium & shoseph

 
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Posted by on November 3, 2011 in NaNoWriMo

 

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NaNoWriMo the First

01 Nov

I am so, so tired.

Last night Caleb and I went to the official HallowNaNoWeen for our area. He’s not participating, but he did great as encouragement, company and courier throughout the night.

The idea is area NaNoers meet up at Denny’s, chat and get to know each other a bit in the hours leading up to midnight, then at the stroke of twelve we start writing. There were door prizes and such (my tablemate won a freaky chicken) leading up to the magical hour. As well as vast amounts of coffee, scrambling for viable power outlets and plates of communal fried foods.

I thought I was ready.

I’ve spent the last month brainstorming and outlining and preparing, all leading up to the moment when I can unleash my fingers on the keyboard. I felt good about the outline, solid on the story (if not the characters, which I thought was understandable and okay).

What I was not prepared for was the unaccomplished Scrivener update that allows me to use fullscreen. Or the lack of internet capability in Denny’s which robbed me of my precious Pandora. Both of which served to team up with the inevitable rush of nerves that comes along with starting a big, new project.

I froze. Four cups of coffee zooming through my veins and it was all I could do to write my main characters name in the Word document I ended up using for the evening. All around me I hear keys clicking away. Then, in about twelve minutes, I start to hear the shouts of people around me, declaring they’ve reached a thousand words. And then, shortly thereafter, a few industrious souls breaching two thousand.

By that point I was rolling, albeit slower than I was totally comfortable with. We left when I was just over the 1k mark, came home, and didn’t sleep.

Caleb updated my Scrivener, and I planted myself in bed until I got myself to the happy 2k mark. Which was around 4 am.

Then to bed and, much, much too soon, back to being awake.

I feel like e freaking zombie, but I’ve managed to eke out another bonnetfull of words. I may write more later, but for now my wordcount, for this first day of NaNoWriMo, stands at:

3719

Not too shabby.

And an unedited excerpt of this day’s zero draft writing efforts:

“Difference is,’ he said, standing, “we need the napkins and the alcohol. And this…” He waved his arm at the trunk, the boxes, the headboard.

“These are all antiques, as you pointed out. There could be something valuable down here.” She pushed the box she’d found in the trunk further into the shadows where she’d dropped it after running into Bryan. “You know, like on that weird TV show you watch?”

Bryan was a fan of PBS, historical novels, baking and teenage girls. If it weren’t for that last one he could have been somebody’s grandma.

Happy NaNoing! Or just Novembering!

Image used under Creative Commons license from zacharmstrong

 
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Posted by on November 1, 2011 in writing

 

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My November Calendar

31 Oct

The first time I participated in NaNoWriMo was 2008. (I had to double-check that year, because it seems like an awfully long time ago.) I outlined about a fifth of my proposed story, started writing, and by the end of the first chapter realized that my plot–which included an at-risk teen going to a haunted boarding school–was preposterous. My main character would never submit to being boarded. So she ran away, instead, and changed the whole damn book. I finished Chasing Smoke on January 6th, 2009.

In 2009 I did a full, if sparse, outline for a novel inspired by something my boss said once, in a rather offhand manner. Struck By Chocolate is a romance novel filled with–you guessed it–chocolate, as well as puns and French-Italians and backbiting coworkers and a secretary that thought she was in the Queen’s Navy. SBC wrapped up on January 12th, I believe, 2010.

2010 was a failure, in terms of NaNo alone, and a partial success in terms of writing a book. You see, I got impatient and started writing a book in October. Then I decided that, for the love of NaNo, I would but Book A on pause, craft a quick draft for a mainstream YA, and then go back to Book A in December.

Ridiculous.

I lasted less than a week before tossing my stupid wanna-be novel in the trash and going back to Book A, which became Cat in the Shel, and which I still am not totally sure what to do with.

My point here being that, when I did finish, I didn’t write The End until some time in January. I’d get my 50k in November, and then things would slow down for Christmas and New Year’s and bathing. This year, I’m going full force. The standard word count goal for NaNo is 1,667 words per day. This would not give me enough words for a finished first draft within the month of November. (I’m aiming for ~85k.) And I really want to finish in November this year, because Uncharted 3 is waiting for me in December. So my goal this year is to write 85k this month.

And take three days off. Because oh my god.

This means I’ll need to average a bit over 3,000 words per day. I’m getting tired just thinking about it. But what the hell, right? I’m young, I’m healthy, and I only live once.

(Plus, Uncharted 3.)

Today I went through my Google calendar and put in my daily wordcount goals, as well as updated all the write-ins in my area I can attend. After I was done, I looked at my screen, hyperventilated a bit, and then decided to share my ridiculous expectations with the rest of you!

So what do you think? Am I mad? What are your crazy impossible awesome goals for November?

And do you have any December treats keeping you moving forward?

 
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Posted by on October 31, 2011 in writing

 

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