Decided to do Camp NaNoWriMo

I haven’t been writing much–NaNoWriMo went well in November and I was able to wrap up a zeroth draft of Waiting for the Hurricane. I had plans to finish a first draft right away, but I couldn’t keep going through the holidays and extensive family obligations and travel. I’ve been working on my art but the writing has not been there.

Today when I was cleaning my desk and putting some stuff away, I knocked a box off the shelf. It landed on my foot. It was the draft and notes for Crows, the ghost story I drafted for NaN0 2013 and did another pass on for Camp NaNoWriMo last year.

So I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo with a goal of finishing the second draft. It will involve mostly filling in the places I skimmed over scenes, probably 20-25K worth of stuff, and deciding what to do about the two romance subplots. If I leave them both in, it might require quite a few more words. We shall see.

I even wrote a synopsis:

Everybody wants to find Carly.

Mrs. Norwood wants to kill her to protect herself. Her mother doesn’t want to lose her unpaid assistant. Heather wants her sister back. Dwight used to date Carly, but now he cares because Heather cares. He’s doing it for the woman he loves.

But the woman he loves doesn’t want him doing it. The woman he loves doesn’t believe in all that psychic stuff, not ghosts and especially not talking crows. The woman he loves thinks he’s batshit crazy.

And the crows are going to make sure he stays that way…

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July plans

Decision one: Camp NaNoWriMo?

Decision two: If so, what?

I can tackle Crows again now that I have a better idea what’s going on (and I need to remember to make some posts here about some of the things I’ve learned.)

Likewise, I could go back to Troy and Sal, or Genie-ous, the two other stories that hung up badly on the same issues.

I could write something new (several choices there)

I could revisit some of my old SF stuff, particularly the intelligent spaceship, or one of the steampunk stories.

I dunno. Thinking about it makes my brain hurt. Just too many choices

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MGR: December–year in review

It was a busy year.

Grandbaby in February. New kitchen floor, gas range, washer and dryer in May. We bought a canoe, used it, and went on wilderness camping trip. And as usual there was golf league and art class.

Lots of walking, though no hiking this year. The focus was on learning to canoe so I’d be ready for the week-long wilderness trip.

Shoveled lots of snow. LOTS of snow.

Besides the trip to California for the grandbaby in February, David visited in June and the whole family including grandbaby was here in August. I visited my family in Montana in September and we took a major cruise in October.

My only goal for the writing this year was to keep working, and I succeeded in that. I had about 125K in new words and lots of revising, worldbuilding, and notes. Specifically:

* Revised outline for the first Sal and Troy book, and started the revised draft.
* Revised outline for Darien and started the revised draft, which stands at about 30K now.

* Revised the genie story, decided the short version wasn’t working, and expanded it to novel length for NaNoWriMo.

* Worked on PattiSue (new adult vampires and werewolves. Oh, the shame…)

* Story a Day yielded 11 ideas, 8 of which became partial drafts. Haven’t looked at them since though.

So it was a pretty good year. Except that for the second year in a row, I didn’t finish anything. And there were a lot of smaller things, like posting here, that I let slide. I’m not going to beat myself up over it. Isn’t it nice to know I have things to work on next year?

Today’s post was inspired by the prompt in the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour, an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. We have all sorts of writers at all stages in their writing career, so there’s something for everyone to enjoy.

If you want to get to know nearly twenty other writers and find out what’s on their nightstand, check out the rest of the tour!.

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April wrapup/May plans

April wound up being fairly successful despite the personal chaos, which can only be described as “internal crisis.” There’s nothing going on outside. The world is good as far as that goes. So I decided to just ignore it and signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo. I’d had a thought out of the blue about how I could resolve a plot-and-motivation problem in Darien’s story and wanted to implement that.

I figured it ought to be good for 50k, but when I got going, I discovered further complications (of the not-good-for-the-story sort 🙂 ) and issues arising from inadequate character development, which in turn revealed big gaps in my worldbuilding. The characters were doing things but they didn’t have attitudes about the world around them, and their interrelationships were exactly like relationships in 2015 America. I had written the earlier draft on the assumption that I could go back and fill in the details later, but clearly that wasn’t working. So I lowered my word count to 30,000, which turned out to be a comfortable pace.

So my plan for May, complicated as it is: keep writing at a comfortable pace 😀

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National Novel Writing Month

I got my 50K words on the new steampunk story around noon. I think the story probably has 20K-30K words left to wrap it up and fill in the gaps, so I’ll be pressing on in December.

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Overamped is done!

I just finished submitting Overamped to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest. 

Here’s the blurb: 

Joey Talmadge’s career as a professional snowboarder is taking off, but the rest of his life is a shambles. His mother drinks. His father is cold and unemotional. His sister is addicted to her career, one cousin is suicidal and another has a drug problem. His beloved grandmother has cancer.

And then his brother Jason is arrested for killing his own wife. He pleads guilty to manslaughter. Joey reluctantly promises not to try to see Jason while he’s serving his time. His mother persists, however, even tricking Joey into driving her to the prison where Jason’s being held.

On top of that, he’s afraid his girlfriend Alyssa is pregnant. He can’t imagine putting a kid through the kind of hell he went through growing up. With a family like his, what chance has he got? He’s glad to escape to Colorado’s high mountains for the start of the competitive season. But he finds himself unable to fall into the old life. The party scene interferes with his training and he keeps thinking of Alyssa and the baby.

An injury, an unexpected visitor, and news from Jason combine to push him to the brink. The only thing scarier than life with Alyssa is life without her. It’s too late to bail now and there’s no place to bail to. Can Joey stomp the landing, or will he wipe out on the biggest hit of his life?

 

 

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Overamped is almost ready to go

124,177 words after edits. Still some cleanup and final spellcheck to go. Plus I have to write a blurb. But Overamped should be in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest on Friday. Assuming they haven’t reached 10K entries before that…

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not gonna be easy

I just started working on Darien’s story again. I put it aside after NaNoWriMo 2007. I told myself it was because it needed more research and worldbuilding, but really it was because it was too difficult emotionally and structurally for me to handle it. Or, in other words, I chickened out.

I have figured out the technical issues involved in telling the story. Most of them, anyway, though I’m sure I’ll find some new ones. It’s still a difficult story to tell, however. I hope I’m strong enough for it this time.

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more on “I don’t want to write”

A statement like that seems straightforward, but when I stopped to think about it, it had a lot of possible meanings I hadn’t considered.

* I don’t wanna! This in the same sense that a toddler doesn’t wanna take a bath.

* I don’t want to, in the same sense a person might say, “I don’t want to go to work today.” The answer is usually, “Tough.”

* I don’t want to write this way: something is wrong with the time, the place, the thing I’m writing about.
* I don’t want to write this, I want to write something else.

* I don’t want to write, in the more basic sense of, “Writing is not the thing I want to be doing for where I am in my life now.”

I thought I probably meant the kind of “I don’t want to write” that means I need a break. A month or two to just read and let things simmer. For some reason the ghost story is one that wants to procede at a leisurely pace; I thought it had just reached one of its quiet points. And this is partly true.

Another big part turns out to be a simple physical issue. I haven’t used this workspace much for months if not years, but since the laptop died, I’ve been here regularly. I never liked this computer much, but it’s just a tool, y’know, and I can live with it. The room is laid out wrong. The chair is uncomfortable, and it can’t be adjusted short enough for me (it used to be my son’s). The desk is laid out wrong. There’s clutter. There’s glare. There’s no good place to spread out. Together, it makes the writing a physically unpleasant experience. And when I think about sitting down to a day’s work, my body goes, “Oh, do we hafta?”

Most of the issues are easy enough to deal with. I got a new keyboard and mouse. I rearranged the desk. I’m still working on clearing out all the clutter, and I may yet move stuff around, but it’s getting there. And as the clutter clears out and the pieces go into place, an idea I’ve been wanting to work on for a while is coming forward again.

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How do you define “writing”?

You know how sometimes when you’re just chatting with various people, the same topic comes up two or three times in the same day? Yesterday, one of my non-writing friends commented on how exciting it must be to have things like a writing website where people could actually talk to the author, and that’s you! And how much fun it must be doing things like author chats and giveaways. (I had to tell her I’m not really at that level yet, but that’s a different topic.) Not five minutes later, another friend was complaining how she spent all day just working on the outline for one story and the edits for another, and she never gets to write any more. This morning another friend said basically the same thing, only she counted the outlining as real writing.

And that got me to thinking about what I consider to be “writing.” It’s not just sitting down to generate new words that never lived anywhere but my head before. For me, editing and rewriting are integral parts of writing, as much a part of the process as the wildest 5K day during NaNoWriMo. I have issues with editing that I don’t usually have with new words, but a day spent polishing Overamped and making it a story that lives and breathes is just as satisfying as a day spent drafting a new idea. Maybe more so, because the draft is always so far from the story in my head.

But there’s also, as my friend who loves author websites pointed out, “writing” as a profession. Back when I was making a living as a freelance technical writer, I found I needed to spend one hour on overhead activity (market research, job listings, maintaining skills, bookkeeping, etc. etc. etc.) for every billable hour. Sometimes that went up to two hours of overhead for every productive hour. Other professionals I’ve talked to have said that’s about their ratio, too. People don’t hire you to write computer manuals if they don’t know about you and the skills you have to offer. [Aside: one of the advantages of working in a corporate environment is that the company assumes much of the overhead.]

The same is true for fiction writing. People won’t buy my fiction if they don’t know I wrote it.

When I think about it that way, the whole cloud of amorphous tasks related to “building a platform” suddenly make a lot more sense. Of course I’m going to have to present a professional image that targets the people I expect to become clients. I’m going to have to network and be involved in shared activities and generally do the same things that any other professional does. And if I don’t find all those activities as enjoyable as the core writing tasks, it’s going to be a difficult slog.

Of course I do have the option of continuing to write as essentially a hobby — finishing a few things and sending them out now and then just for the satisfaction, the way I’ve been doing. I don’t need to earn a living and nothing says I can’t be just an “artist.” But if I’m going to take the other path, I need to look at it more seriously and see what work needs to be done to do it right.

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