Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Aaaaaand I'm done!

Woot woot, just wrapped up my NaNo novel. What a fun month--fast too. I can't believe the thirty days are over, it felt like I just started.

My novel took a few strange twists and turns, and I didn't get as much put into it as I would have liked, I had expected it to be twice as long and imagined slapping a 'the end' somewhere into the middle but I ran out of story way too soon and now I'm puzzeling over what I left out.

Oh well, plenty of time to fix that later, the point is, I'm done, I won, and I bought the shirt to prove it.

Like promised I will be sticking it in a dark corner of my computer to percolate until such a time as my typed word becomes the printed word. Time to spruce up my first book and get it published! The new writing club a few fellow NaNo'ers and I have started will be helpful in keeping the fire lit under my butt on that I hope.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Finish line in sight

Last night I made the most progress in my NaNo novel so far. I came in just short of 4k words. With the end in sight things are starting to get pretty interesting in my story and I couldn't stop. Admittedly I had to dry my eyes a couple times as I killed off one of my favorite characters, but I always knew his time was short. Luckily he'll live on in memories :)

Only 8k to go, and I'm so close to the end I'm not sure where I'll put all those words. Last night I started dreaming up new scenes to add some character depth into the novel so that's always an option. I'd guess today I'll get to the end of the story and start working my way back from the start, adding in things here and there.

When I hit 50k this project gets shevled until I sell my first book. Hopefully I will revist and polish it up and it can join it's predessor on a shelf in a book store one day. I've really enjoyed my very first NaNo and can't wait till next year.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Blew through the first half.

Woot over 25k now and still going strong. I've been hitting my daily quota regularly (okay, I admit, I did miss one day) and thanks to some good advice (Thanks Judith http://judithgraves.com/) found a whole new avenue to explore within my book from a second character POV.

I'm getting pretty close to sending out my queries for my first book THE STONE SLEEPERS. Now that I've been tweaking the story line to make things work for the second book, there's some work to go back and fix to keep things linear.

Anyways, enough procrastinating for today (Seriously, my living room didn't need dusting, vacuuming and rearanging...well, probably the dusting, and fine the rearanging too--just bought an X-Box Kinect and those suckers need some open floor space)

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Things are starting to pick up now!

I forgot how hard it is to write the beginning of a book. My last one ended up with a total of seven starts. With NaNo I don't have time to rewrite yet so I'm just plowing ahead.

12k plus words. I'm getting into my groove and making some good progress. I'm excited to sit down and see what happens next. I've learnt alot about my characters and the big picture of what this series will end up being.

I think today was a record. I got to my word goal by 10:30 am, instead of staying up late into the night to make sure I didn't fall behind! I have the rest of the day to sit down and write when I want to, rather then having to.

My fav threads in the forums so far are
-Adopt a tag line for a villan (can't stop saying 'I'll kill you right in the face' lol)
-Free words (I wrote down most of them and am crossing them off as I sneak them into my work)
and last but not least
-I didn't know that about my character (so of course I had to write up Declan, my bog snorkeling, Irish distant relation to my FMC that literaly popped up from nowhere and decided he was sticking around)

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

3 days in!

So NaNo is finally here and instead of going with my well thought out and planned novel--seriously I have each scene written out and filed in a recipe box--I've jumped the smooth sailing ship and am headed up pants mountain along with most everyone else.

I'm still hard at work on my YA novel THE STONE SLEEPER'S and didn't want to get into writing the sequal until it was completely done. Until I could read it start to finish without making the slightest tweak. After realizing that day would never come I said to hell with it, maybe I'll get to know my characters better through the sequal and it can only improve my first novel.

My NaNo project has turned into Book Two of the Stone Sleeper's series and I'm having a blast. The course has been rocky these first few days and I'm desperatly walking around the house gong "I need an action scene, maybe____can happen?"

The forums are a fun place to hang out waiting for inspiration to strike. Already I can't wait to do it again next year!

(4485 and counting)