A Good Witch Goes to War

We had a power outage today – smack in the middle of all the cooking (no worries, it all worked out in the end) – but it turned out to be a not so bad thing as I got the new book NaNo finished. Technically, the splat draft was about 4000 words short but I had several scenes that were nothing more than a couple of ‘and then’ sentences so I was able to do that between yesterday and today. Technically, I believe this is the 16th book I’ve drafted. Not all those drafts actually turned into novels – about half I think. This is going to be one of the books that get rewritten and polished up and thrown to the winds. I ended up really liking this book even if it wasn’t exactly the book I thought it would be.

I have another book, it feels sort of folk horrorish, sort of fluttering around in my head but I really think it needs to ruminate for a good while before putting it down in words. And now, my January plan is pretty well set. Rewrites and edits!  I’m taking December to work on making presents for people and things for the etsy shop. Hopefully, my hands and fingers will let me do all the things I want to do.

Writing Wednesday: Nano Prep

National Novel Month is fast approaching. Some writers go into the challenge with little more than a notebook or a blank document. Other writers have full outlines, character sketches, and backstories already ready to go. There is no wrong way to participate in NaNoWriMo just as there is no wrong way to write. Poor pacing, clunky writing, cutout characters can all be fixed in edits, just write until the story is done. If you need an outline, use one. If you need a board full of snips and profiles, put one together! You’ve still got 15 days (or so) to hammer out that foundation work.

I don’t do a lot of prep work but I do tend to have the most basic idea and maybe a working title and usually a general playlist. I use Pandora and put together my music choice based on the sort of feelings I want my characters to be feeling. I write to music. I write best with headphones on, volume up, and dog tucked in beside me. I am not looking for the tone of the book or theme or even what I want the reader to feel, that will all come organically if I get the characters and their emotions right.

On rare occasion, I’ll hit up Pinterest and look for wardrobe pieces or jewelry or just the right sort of car. I do have boards for some of my books and I’m sure I’ll have more as time goes by. Some writers I know prefer tangible resources – pictures ripped from magazines, notes on sticky notes or pinned to a board or glued into a binder. It’s old school Pinterest like my wish book (I used to have a binder full of things I want or things I want to make).

There are a lot of character sheets out there but I tend to use DnD character sheets when I use them. They’re structured well for the way I do things. Ywriter (the program) has character profile sections and setting profile sections that can be really useful if you need to have all the prep work before the writing happens. And yWriter keeps it all in one handy dandy place.

If you are a writer who needs that foundation before you can write, there is still time to get on that and come join the rest of the crazypants people who dedicate their Novembers to creating new books.

Writing Wednesday: NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is coming up quick – November 1st always comes too fast when I’m trying to enjoy my Halloween and then, it’s back to work! The idea is to write a 50,000 word draft of a novel, start to finish, in 30 days. It sounds like a crazy idea. It’s really not though. It’s about the community and the accountability of it and really, it amounts to 1667 words per day. That’s an hour of writing if you write 28 words per minute. When you chop it up into bites, even an elephant can be eaten.

I personally like the accountability of it. It’s helped me focus on just one project for a set period of time. The years that I’ve been successful, I wrote the first drafts of Guardian of the Gods, Eldercynne Rising, and Hunter’s Crossing (and the book I’m currently pitching places and one I’ve set aside for a while).

NaNoWriMo is an excellent tool for people who struggle not to constantly rewrite and revise. In my experience, one of the hardest lessons to learn is that you have to let your work be awful. Write it from start to finish and let it be as bad as anything you’ve ever written. Sure, make notes about ideas you had for the beginning as you’re slogging through the middle, but don’t go backward. Go forward all the way to the end first. Find your plot lines first. Show yourself the whole story first. I understand maybe you outline, maybe you think you know how you’re story ends, and maybe you really do, but my experience has been that, when I’m in the thick of the story, a better path nearly always shows itself.

The most common complaint I hear from newer writers is that they just can’t seem to get past the first section/chapter. They keep rewriting it, going back and fixing it. That’s why I’m such a huge fan of splat drafts/zero drafts. Start to finish, barely readable, certainly not publishable, splat drafts are just to get the bones down. Once you have the foundation, you can Winchester House your story all you want (if you’ve never heard of the Winchester House, please Google – it’s an interesting story). Once you’ve reached the end of a book the first time, subsequent books will always be less intimidating because you’ve already done it. It’s a bit like Harry Potter and his patronus – he knew he could do it because he already had (except logic and timey wimey stuff there’s issue with but whatever).

Nanowrimo helps boost good daily writing habits too. I’m terrible at writing every day unless I’m working on something specific and November and nano are always a good reset for me. I start the year out great but by November, I definitely need a bit of a reboot and it’s nice knowing that so many people are out there doing the same thing.

And I’m stuck

I hit 30,000 words give or take 5 and I’ve stalled out. I’m not liking the direction of the story at all but I’m not sure where it went wrong either. It’s a little infuriating though. Sometimes, no matter how clever, the bones fall apart just when the shape of your dinosaur is coming together you discover you’ve added too many carnivore pieces to your herbivore. bah. I’ve also had a small string of rejections and that doesn’t help. Ultimately, not every idea is going to work itself out. Maybe down the road, I’ll have an epiphany and bam – I’ll know why it went belly up on me.

I have too many irons in my fire as it is though with edits and marketing stuff and other deadlines I’m trying to meet so I’m not really terribly upset by the whole thing. Really, the answer might occur to me in a few days and 2 or 3 really hammering days, maybe I can still finish but I won’t be terribly upset if something happens that I don’t. I know I can finish a draft in pretty short order which is the most important lesson NaNoWriMo has to offer in my personal opinion. I’m not technically counting it as failed just yet but I am limiting my expectations.

Good things, Better Things

This past week has been pretty interesting and even mostly good. A couple weeks ago I pitched a story for a project that got accepted, written, revised, tweaked, submitted, accepted, and paid pro-rates all in the span of three weeks. Sure it was super short but I had a really great time with it (and I’ll be sharing it all over the place when release comes lemme tell you). I pitched a few things for some freelance type projects and ghostwriting things but I’m not so sure about those yet. I got a release date for Christmas in Bear Ridge (December 4th people – remember it well, I’ll be doing something special that day!). And yesterday, I was able to run around all over the strip district and nearly keep up with everyone. I’m paying for it today a bit but it was mostly worth it, all the way up until the last fifteen minutes anyway.

I’m a little worried about next month. It turns out edits will be happening in November but it doesn’t mean that I’m giving up on NaNoWrimo, it just means that I’ll have a lot fewer days to do it in or that I’ll have to steal an hour from edits every day anyway. I made a post the other day about NaNo and how it really is possible, even if you have a full-time job, kids, and responsibilities. Guess it’s time to put up or shut up. I sort of want to do something completely different this year but I’m not sure exactly what I want to do yet. I have far fewer days to figure it out than I would like!

I made a sale over at the etsy shop and there’s a little part of me that was sort of sad to see it go, even if I did make one for myself too. I’m definitely going to be doing one crafty fair in December hopefully with copies of Bear Ridge to celebrate with but I know it’s pushing the timeline kind of close so we’ll see on that one.

Basically, I’ve had a really good week. I don’t know why it’s so much easier to focus on the awful ones or why they seem to count more. I know I’ve got good things going on but sometimes it’s really hard to focus on that when I’m obsessing over the latest rejections or inactivity or weigh in. I’ll figure it out someday. In the meantime, I’m going to try a little harder to remember how much farther up the goal staircase I am now than I was ten years ago.

Writer Wednesday: NaNoWriMo

It might be a little early to start posting about National Novel Writing Month, but November comes pretty quickly in my experience. The premise is this, sit down and write a complete 50,000 word draft of a novel in one November. I know, the idea of 50,000 words in a month is incredibly daunting but it is more than doable. I should know, I’ve done it successfully five or six times now (three of which are published and readily available after a great many rewrites and edits).

Recently I was asking other writers if they were planning to attempt this year and I had to explain what it was to some but others just scoffed at me because they have real jobs and don’t have time for that. Personally, I find that incredibly obnoxious and petty – to use that inflection on “real” that way. Maybe I’m the odd duck but I treat my writing like a “real” job because it is one. And to be frank, NaNo is a lot less daunting then you might think.

Let’s do the math! 50,000 words in 30 days is 1667 words per day. If you can find one hour in any given day – just one – you can do NaNoWrimo. So you miss your TV show or you go to bed an hour late for a month. Most people I know can find an hour. Not everyone can and I know some of those people too but most people. If you can write 28 words per minute, you can do 1667 words in an hour. The real struggle is finding the words you want to use at any given moment.

Time alone is not the big bad block people make it out to be, especially where writing is concerned. Time can be found, scrounged, stolen in pieces. I’ve been known to take a notebook into the kitchen while I’m cooking dinner to jot down notes or snippets. I’ve been known to wake up in the middle of the night and make notes on the pad beside the bed or on my phone. I might not always understand them the next day but they’re there. I’ve been known to write through whatever show everyone else is watching or stay up after everyone goes to bed.

Just remember, if you’re doing NaNo and the idea of 50,000 words feels daunting, break it down. 28 words per minute. That’s all it takes. You can do it!

2017 NaNoWriMo

Is coming to a close in a few short hours and I have failed. Miserably. But I did write. I’ve written more this month than I have all year. It’s different now than it was and I’m a little, ok, a lot, sad about that. I miss having someone pester me about what I’m working on or how much I got done. Even when I wanted to yell at him for being pestery, I was always glad my Dad cared enough to pester. He was my biggest support, my cheerleader, my first reader, my editor, and my fact checker. I know I have had friends tell me that I’m a fount of useless knowledge but if I’m a fount, he was a river. Writing isn’t the same now.

I’ll get back to normal eventually but apparently not this year.

Stuff and Things

I am still plugging along on Hunter’s Hell but I’m not counting on winning NaNoWriMo this year. The ideas are there and solid but the fingers are not quite cooperating the way I’d like. I’m about 10,000 words behind I think, give or take, but I haven’t started today’s words yet either. Even if I don’t manage to win, I’ll have a complete draft well before Christmas and that’s really what matters.

I went to my rheumy last week. I’m not entirely sure I like him yet – I’m definitely not really comfortable yet but I don’t really expect to be this early yet either. Fortunately, we are starting the process to drop the prednisone so hopefully, that means I’ll go back to having next to no panic attacks or crying jags in the middle of Kroger. He also upped the other med – but mostly it just makes me sleepy and a little forgetful and that’s not terrible. I’m having some increased pain in my hands but I expected that also so I’m not terribly worried about that either. It is what it is. I’d like to be closer to normal but I can’t make things happen any faster so there’s no point in being defeatist about it.

Next week is Thanksgiving here in the states. I am not looking forward to it this year. This will be the first year without my Dad and if I think of my mom most around Christmas and Halloween, I think of my dad around Thanksgiving and New Years. I’m not saying I”m going to start eating sauerkraut because ew, but I’ll be thinking about him and all his superstitions anyway on the first of the year. On Thanksgiving, I’ll be missing his sweet potato flambe for sure. It was my favorite from the time I was ten. I’m really glad my husband doesn’t really get it – really glad – but there’s a part of me that just wants to be miserable and maudlin and be left alone. That’s not how it’s going to work but that’s what I want to do.

I’m finding NaNoWriMo is a bit difficult this year without my cheering section calling to see how many words I’ve gotten. I don’t think I realized how much I appreciated having someone who was invested in my successes and failures and progresses.

Winding down

The fair is done and my whole body is feeling it today! I met some interesting people and made some good connections and even sold a few books. I have some new stuff to get up on Etsy this week but not today – my fingers and knees are hurting. I’m falling behind on the book but I’ll catch up during the week when I’m not trying to make stuff too.

I’ve got bloodwork and a doctor’s appointment this week and I’m really hoping I can get off the prednisone ASAP. I do not like it at all. I had been doing so great with my panic attacks – I haven’t had many to speak of in a long time and now they’re getting to be a little bit regular and I don’t like that at all – I’ve been there, done that, wouldn’t like to go back there. I also blame my newfound weepiness on it too – I’m crying at the dumbest stuff. I burst into tears in Krogers because they didn’t have the breakfast my youngest son requested. I cried at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, not for that movie but because I was so upset that the role of Batman did not go to Joseph Gordan-Levitt who deserved it (and the story was perfect for it!) but to the guy I don’t see as anything like Batman (so much so that I haven’t even watched it). Both of those things are upsetting but neither is really honestly cry-worthy. I’m a lot quicker to get mad too and I really don’t like it. The other meds, it is what it is. My nails are terrible, my skin is terrible, but my hair isn’t falling out and I’m not hurting anywhere near as bad as I was. I’ll do as I’m told because, as much as I don’t like one of the ladies in the office so much, the doctor himself seems to know what he’s doing and for sure he knows more than I do.

I’m going to get some words today but I am not going to push too much with my fingers today – they need some recovery time right now. I’m in an interesting place in the book though, some ramifications from the events of book one are coming to light and no one knows what it means longterm just yet (not even me!), and the new plot is getting a little convoluted and the connections are starting to come to light and it’s just beginning to get exciting. This is my favorite part of the process but I’m a little worried that I’m coming to this point too early so I might have to toss in a small distraction or two as they figure stuff out. This is the sort of stuff that makes me remember why writing is my all time favorite thing to do.

Craft Fair!

I have a craft fair tomorrow – if you’re in the area, you should come. I know a couple of the vendors and I’ve seen pictures of others. I’ll be there with weird stuff and books and some not so weird stuff too – repurposing is my new kick at the moment and I’m having fun with it. I’ll be the tiny island of odd under the sorting hat tree topper. Seriously though – there are a lot of really neat looking things on the vendor list and you should come talk to me there.

3rd Annual Santa’s Runway at the Millsop Community Center in Weirton, WV starts at 11 am on Saturday, November 11, 2017.

There are things I didn’t get finished – I haven’t had the dexterity to do much with polymer clay or even paint lately but glue and fabric and enamels, I have that down pat!

Now, I’m headed back to the book as very much doubt I’ll be getting a lot of words tomorrow or Sunday so I need to try and get out ahead of things. I’m at 16145 right now and Lei is just beginning to realize how much trouble she’s in so that’s fun. 50K or Bust!