Topic: Projects

At a few min­utes before mid­night I am declar­ing NaNoW­riMo over, and I did not make it to 50,000 words.

In the mid­dle of the month I had a bunch of work that need­ed to be done for mon­ey, and a par­tic­u­lar­ly amaz­ing week­end work­shop led by the incom­pa­ra­ble Jason McClain. So after get­ting to 19,478 words by day 10 I plateaued and and did­n’t start rack­ing the word count up for 13 days. On … Read the rest

This thing keeps tak­ing me in unex­pect­ed direc­tions. What I thought had gone side­ways a cou­ple days ago has gone far­ther sideways.

Yes­ter­day I did­n’t get as much writ­ing done and I did­n’t think I’d get much done today because I had a lot of oth­er work to do. But I carved out some time in the morn­ing and then got on a roll in the late evening. I fin­ished a 3500 word chap­ter (2,824 of which … Read the rest

I start­ed by flesh­ing out some of what I’d already writ­ten, pro­vid­ing some more detail in the con­ver­sa­tion that ends the first chap­ter. I’ve also decid­ed to upgrade a minor char­ac­ter; he may still be a minor char­ac­ter, but I’ve decid­ed against dis­card­ing him. He’ll appear again.

That flesh­ing-out progress is the sort of thing I’m prob­a­bly not «sup­posed» to do dur­ing NaNoW­riMo. The plan is to get the words out there, fast and furi­ous, not spend a cou­ple of … Read the rest

Day two of the NaNoW­riMo chal­lenge is done. It’s ear­ly enough that I might con­ceiv­ably go back to writ­ing but late enough that tak­ing a break now means I’m like­ly to be done for the day.

I fin­ished the first chap­ter of the nov­el. I’ve intro­duced one major char­ac­ter direct­ly and four oth­er major char­ac­ters in backstory/exposition. And I’ve start­ed anoth­er chap­ter, which intro­duces one more major char­ac­ter, though we haven’t real­ly got­ten to know any­thing about her yet. Today’s word … Read the rest

Today was the First of Novem­ber, and there­fore the first day of NaNoW­riMo or Nation­al Nov­el Writ­ing Month. The chal­lenge is to write a nov­el of at least 50,000 words entire­ly dur­ing the month of Novem­ber. It’s a some­what ambi­tious under­tak­ing and there­fore tempt­ing not to talk about it until it’s done for fear that I might announce the project and then not fol­low through.

But the flip side of that impulse is that not telling any­one what … Read the rest