NaNoWriMo Wrap Up

NaNoWriMo Wrap Up

If you haven't validated your NaNoWriMo words, better hop to it. New Zealanders are officially right out. Asia's next.

Me? I won't be validating. Why? Read on...

Maggie Steifvater, author of Shiver, recently posted a NaNo break-up letter. (click through to read the whole thing and the comments. It's a great post.)

Here are some choice bits:

Dear NaNoWriMo,

We're through.

You are not a bad concept. You're a bad concept for me [though], NaNo. This is why: you make me write crap, NaNo. You make me make bad novel decisions. You take away my ability to brainstorm between chapters. You make me rush through characterization. You make me pack filler in that will only get ripped out later, having taught me nothing about my novel. You make me into a bad writer.

You know what hurts me the most, NaNo? I want to write something meaningful. Something with subtext and theme. That's the reason I write, really. And you took that away from me. How could I possibly contemplate the greater picture when I was constantly chasing word count?

Oh, for weeks I believe[d] your spiel: that it was okay that we were bad in the sack together now, that we'd get better with revising. But I see through your lies, baby. We will never get to sweet, sweet passionate love on the beach from where we are here. Basically, if we played the game your way, I'd end up rewriting every single word I wrote.

But it took me a long time to get to that point, NaNo. Because you made me feel like I was turning my back on some great goal that I'd made. You hit me where it hurt, NaNo; you know that I don't like to give up a goal once I've made it. So here's where I say thanks. You taught me that not all goals are good goals. That some are picked up out of principle and aren't worth pursuing. You reminded me of what I used to always tell people in conjunction with my little goals speech: that you should choose your battles wisely.

50,000 superficial words of love,

Maggie [And Cassandra]

Yep, that's right. See this graph?



Yep. I quit. I got frustrated and tired and had no time to sit and think and it was seriously effecting my writing. Seriously, I wrote the line, '“Fine, whatever. I’m going back to the carrots.” He stalks off, like celery.'

Seriously.

While funny, when your writing starts sucking that bad it's time to review.

So my final word count is 38,107. And for now, that's good enough for me.



I've learned

-that not all goals are good goals.
-that a good word count pace for me is 800-1000 words a day, 5-6 days a week
-how to pace myself when a real deadline comes along
-how to keep myself refreshed and writing when things get difficult
-that there is an awesome community of writers out there
-sometimes it's okay to put down your writing and watch a few ep's of Ghost Whisperer, but then get back to work

And that's what i'm doing now, i'm getting back to work.

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

See this graph?



Yeah, i'm a little behind. Again. I know.

So is everyone else i've talked to that's doing NaNo this year.

Thing is though, none of us have given up hope yet. We have full faith in ourselves to get to that 50k no matter what it takes.

My slump started off with a sinus problem when it rained for a couple of days here. All I wanted to do was sleep and then go back to bed. You can see by the graph that I skipped a day on the 20th. That was a bad day.

Since then, though, i've made myself write at least 1000 words a day before I let myself go to sleep. I think this is a good pace for me. Some days I can punch out more, but 1000 seems to be good for me.

I like to let my ideas percolate, I like to be reading lots of books to help inspire me, (i've only read 2.5 in November so far! my usual number is 4 or 5 a WEEK! Don't even ask how this has affected my interning duties... that's a whole other mess i'm not particularly proud of) I just need a break, darnit!

Something about adding an extra 600 to the mess is killing me. I feel burned out, run over, and all those cliche phrases that mean i'm just freaking fed up. Don't get me wrong, I still love my novel, and I will finish it, no matter if I have to keep writing 1000 words a day and end up finishing on 10 December.

I don't want to though. I want to beat that 50k over the head with an extra large keyboard and then take a week off to read some books and re-energize myself.

Just seven more days. Just seven more days. Just seven more days.

I can do this.

xkcd does Chronicles of Narnia: TLTWATW

xkcd does Chronicles of Narnia: TLTWATW

It's no secret that the Chronicles of Narnia are among my favorite books, so imagine my surprise when I checked my reader and found xkcd has a new post, and yes, it featured the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe!



I seriously laughed out loud. For a long time. It was AWESOME.

Go visit the site to see it in all it's lovely bookish glory!

C. A. Marshall <3's xkcd!

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update (and sneak peek at my novel!)

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update (and sneak peek at my novel!)

So you see this graph?



Definite improvement after I found a different book to read. I'm almost ahead by a day, too. I'll get those 5500 words caught up in no time!

I didn't write anything yesterday, and i'm still ahead by nearly a day.

I wrote the ending bit, where Sofia has to say goodbye to her father for the last time only he has no idea what's going on. I shared that bit with my MI::Elsewhere NaNo buddies and they loved it, so that's good.

What? You guys want to read it, too? Oh, alright...

I shove the last box into the back of my car and have to smash myself against the door to get it to close.
“You’re donating all that stuff?” Dad asks, handing me a garbage bag full of more of his old clothes.
I put it in the front seat with a lamp and a box of my photographs. “Yeah, I’m not using it anymore, it might as well go to some people who need it, you know? Especially with Christmas coming up and all.”
I feel sad about missing christmas with my father. He might not be able to manage decent dinners every other day of the year but he’s a magician with a turkey. Dad went to three stores last year looking for the perfect one. He cooks the turkey and I make a mean cranberry casserole and we sit on the floor and open one present the night before as a ‘preview gift’. It’s a sort of joke with dad and I. We give lame gifts as a preview, last year I gave him a box of postcards with pictures of male 70’s clothes models. He got me a set of three hairnets with kittens all over them.
I look at dad and try to make a mental image of what it’s like for him to look at me in the eyes.
“You ok, Sof?” he asks
“Yeah,” I say. It’s just that I’ll never see you again. You’ll never see me. You won’t even know you have a daughter.
“Well get going, I think the donation center closes at six,” he says.
I stare at him and try to hold back my tears before I rush to hug him. “I love you, dad.”
“Well I love you, too, Sof! What’s this about?”
“I just love you, thats all,” I say as a few tears escape and I hurriedly wipe them away. “Thanks for being the best father ever.”
“What are you crying for, silly?” he says, letting me go. His eyes are welling up now too.
“Going through all this stuff, I know you’ve tried your best to make me happy. I just wanted to thank you.”
“Well you’re welcome, honey,” he says. “I just wish your mom had been around to do all that girly stuff with you.”
This is my last chance to ask him. “Why don’t you remember mom?”
“Who told you that?”
“I just know, dad. Why can’t you remember her?”
“I don’t know,” he sighs. “This therapist guy says that it’s repressed memories from the anger I have for her leaving us, leaving you.”
“What do you think?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe I’m angry, maybe I’m not. I don’t feel angry. I just wish I could remember, wish I could tell you that everything will be alright even though she’s gone.”
I look up at dad.
“Get in the car, we can talk some more about this later.”
“Ok,” I say, kissing him on the cheek.
I walk to my car and just before I get in I stop and for the first time I’m really sad that everything has to change. I didn’t realize it would be this hard to let him go.
“Dad?” I say, and he turns around.
“Yeah?”
“Everything is going to be alright, you know.”
“With you as a daughter, how could it ever go wrong?”
We both smile at one another and then I get in the car and drive away.
I hope he’s happy someday. He deserves to be happy.

Thoughts? Comments? Slander? Stock tips?

In case you're confused, couple things, 1. this is the end of the book and Sofia has decided to become a reaper instead of dying normally. 2. you have to know that when a person becomes a reaper, the people that knew them in life do not remember them anymore. Sofia, being a reaper candidate does remember the mother. Is the mom a reaper, too? Who knows... That would be in book two if this ever becomes a series/has a sequel :) 3. Sofia has just had a garage sale with her friend and she's supposedly taking some stuff to donate but she's really taking it to the house where she will live as a reaper.

I'm nearly done with Theodosia and I love it! Such a fun romp through Britain in the 1800's! I don't even like egyptian stuff and i'm loving the book.

Tomorrow is going to be lots of query reading and then some more writing. I'm determined, darnit!

Oh, and don't forget to catch the meteor showers tonight/tomorrow!

Why getting published is like a baby squirrel trying to jump on a wall

Why getting published is like a baby squirrel trying to jump on a wall

First, watch this:



Isn't that adorable? Such cute widdle squirrwels.. *ahem*

See that big squirrel there? That big squirrel is your favorite author. For me, that would be Jane Austen. Yes, Jane Austen is my big squirrel.



Your big squirrel has a book published and you want to be just like them. You want to jump up on that wall. you want to be super squirrel!



But like that little squirrel, you think you just can't do it, it's too high.

So you do a little research, maybe take a class, join a writing group, get your MA, read every blog post by every agent ever, whatever it is you decide to do.

And then you write your first book.

"Yay!" you think! Finally I can be a published author!

Not so fast, little squirrel.



You've got that backpack full of knowledge and you're standing on it and yet you just can't quite make it.

So what do you do? You go back and learn some more. You revise, you work on your query, you maybe write another book.

And then you get an agent!



That agent is your sandbag. They will help you get up on that wall. You'll work with them to polish your book and then your agent will put you out on submission to editors.

You fight with all the other books out there to get published.



Then! You get a book deal! You get on that wall! YAYYYYY!

Time to celebrate!



You've made it up on that wall!

Let's hope we all get that chance and that we have an amazing soundtrack for it too!

(100th blog post!) NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

(100th blog post!) NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

I passed the halfway mark tonight with 25,784 words. Now, granted, I really think of this as having just over 21k without that 5500 that I added in to make myself feel better but you know what? It worked.

I've written more in one night than I have in the past several nights, just because I wasn't so worried about making word count. In fact, i'm a days worth of words ahead! If I can work my way up to 5k ahead, i'll take those extra words out and then try and build a lead again.

Now that i've got this extra boost, things are much happier in my writing room. Especially because i've gotten rid of The Book Thief and have started Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. It makes me happy because one of my MC's is named Theo, but he's a boy.

I wonder if this would work if I had just added some Lorem Ipsum words... Might have to try that out sometime!

In other news, this is my 100th post! yay!

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

I've been reading Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief before bed for the past week or so. I've read about half of it, and I like what i've read so far, but I just can't get into it like I want to. Everyone says it's an amazing book and I wanted to like it so much, but I just don't.

This must be what it's like for agents who are on the fence about a prospective authors book. They might like it enough to read it but they just can't fully commit to it.

It's a shame, really, it really has been a good read so far. I would still recommend it.

(Gone With The Wind, not so much)

In other news, i've added in the words to my NaNo novel that I had written before November actually started. I know that's a huge no-no (hey, i'm a NaNo rebel afterall!), but I just got so frustrated with not being able to read something I like (I read for inspiration when i'm stuck). It was only 5k and it gives me a good cushion now. I will try my darndest to keep ahead from now on. This might just be the boost I needed.

I feel pretty confident that after I pass the 30k mark and i'll allow myself to go back and write the past-tense stuff that my word counts will be easier to meet. I've been skipping the "flashback" parts for the most part because I don't want to get caught messing up tenses. I've tried two of them so far and found several random tense changes in them. I'm too much of a stickler to just let them be that way until NaNo is over. I must edit, I can't help it!

Up next to read: R. L. Lafever's Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos :)

In The News: Police vow crackdown on Jane Austen ‘coquette’ culture

In The News: Police vow crackdown on Jane Austen ‘coquette’ culture

"Surrey police have embarked on an ambitious campaign to try to curb the rising phenomenon of anti-social incidents involving young women emulating behaviour they’ve picked up from the novels of Jane Austen.

‘It’s happening in towns all over Britain. Young ladies are falling out of assembly rooms at night, a giggling mass of fluttering fans and heaving bosoms in tight corsets,’ said DC John Naismith, who increasingly finds himself having to disband late-night minuets on the streets of Dorking.

‘And the mouth on some of them… I recently remonstrated with one such young woman, asking her what sort of a man she hopes to attract by singing Mozart arias in the middle of the street. ‘I know not, gentle sir,’ she replied, ‘but may he have a thousand pounds a year and a sizeable estate in Derbyshire!’ Of course I threw her arse in the cells, the cheeky [b!tch].’

As reports of unbearably repressed sexual tension continue to dominate the headlines, victim support groups are keen to warn girls against the dangers of being overly flighty and coquettish. [...] ‘Every day we field calls from girls who have brought shame and disgrace upon their family name and quite ruined their sisters’ chances of making good marriages, purely on the promise of a moonlit elopement and a new bonnet.’"

Lifted from a NewsBiscuit article by Mary Evans

Contest Alert: Win a Kindle!

Contest Alert: Win a Kindle!

Lisa and laura Roecker have been given a free Kindle by the universe and they want you to win it!

Here's how you can win:

• This contest is only open to people who are following their blog. Not a follower? Well, that's easy to fix, just click the follow button up in the top left hand corner. (You can follow me, too, if you like :)
• All blog followers will automatically get one entry in the contest.
• If you comment on the contest post you will get a second entry.
• If you blog about this contest and post a link in the comments section of the contest post you will get a third entry.
• The contest ends at midnight on Friday, November 13th.

The Roecker Sisters are the authors of The Haunting of Pemberly Brown (Sourcebooks Spring 2011)

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

NaNoWriMo Word Count Update

I'm chugging away at my novel. 15k is right on par. A couple of pivotal chapters have been written and it's fun joining up the sections that I have jumped ahead to and making them flow into one another.

As soon as all this present-tense stuff is written, it will be both fun and challenging to go back and do the past-tense. It's set up similar to Gayle Forman's If I Stay if you're confused.

I would like to be ahead so I have some leeway but I think that if I did I might be tempted to go watch the six episodes of Ghost Whisperer that are currently waiting for me on the DVR and give myself a day off from writing.

Keeping a slow and steady pace is actually helping to keep me on task. Instead of puttering around all day and then getting some writing done at 11pm, i'm trying to write earlier in the day so I can get my word count in by midnight. If I don't (meaning I don't stop writing until 3a) the NaNo site switches over to the next day and I don't get my count in and it looks like i'm behind. I don't like that.

And hey, i've got my par done for today and it's not even 11p yet. There's still time to watch those eps of Ghost Whisperer afterall!

NaNoWriMo Word Count update

NaNoWriMo Word Count update

So I basically had 4700 words, and now I have 8400. That's a lot of freakin words in one day. I'm exhausted.



I don't think I could have done it without the Michigan::Elsewhere chat buddies. We do this 'word war' thing that basically means we write as much as we can in an alloted amount of time (usually 10 or 15 minutes) and then compare results. This one chick can get 700 words down in 15 minutes, time after time after time. It's nuts.

It's not so much the competition that I enjoy about it, it's the pressure to beat my last number. There's no way i'm getting 700 words down, but if I could beat 503, beat 507, beat 511, then that's 503, 507, and 511 more words more than what I had before I started and before I know it, i've put in 4k words in a single afternoon. It's really quite remarkable. As soon as the word war is over, i'm like 'again, again!' like some demented Tellytubby on repeat.

The goal is 10k tomorrow.

NaNoWriMo Word Count update

NaNoWriMo Word Count update

Jr used bleach yesterday and I was downstairs for only about a minute but that was all it took for the bleach migraine from hell. I went to bed really really really early.

Which means, of course, that I missed my 1600 NaNo word count mark by about a thousand.

Which means, of course, that there were six episodes of Ghost Whisperer that needed watching today...

::le sigh::

I've got big plans for tomorrow. Like 4k in big plans. I can do it.

NaNoWriMo Update

NaNoWriMo Update

There be my wildly naive and n00b-ish cover for Novel 2, which i'm calling 30 Days To Die for lack of a better title at the moment.

Synopsis: 30 Days to Die

Seventeen year old Sofia is finally breaking out of her good-girl shell. She's hanging around Eden and her friends, finally going to parties, and just starting to think that her life has a purpose.

Then she almost runs down Theo Winters, a mysterious guy who tells her she has thirty days to die. Confused, frightened, and intrigued, Sofia learns from Theo and his two kid sidekicks that she has a choice to make: die normally and be remembered or die and be forgotten and become a grim reaper.

Which would you choose if you had 30 days to die?

Excerpt: 30 Days to Die

“Excuse me?” I sit up straighter.
Theo stands up and begins pacing. “This is so hard to explain.”
“Well explain it, you’re freaking me out.”
“The truth is, you’re a grim reaper too. Or, you will be in thir—twenty nine days. If you want to.”
“What if I don’t want to die at all?”
“You don’t have a choice in that. You will die.”
“How is that a choice?”
“The choice is this: die normally and be remembered, or die and be forgotten and become a reaper.”



Look for word count updates on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays! Or, you know, whenever I remember to do it.