Jumping on the Social Media Bandwagon

Last night I drove all the way to Edmonton to attend a writing workshop, (alright I also went early enough to sneak in a visit with my adorable niece Samantha) but the workshop was a good excuse to get out of the house for the night.

The workshop was called Your Book as a Business and was very helpful in a lot of ways. I found that it was aimed primarily towards people who were looking to self promote and geared pretty much toward everything other than commercial fiction. I wasn't sure if I would be able to use a lot of the strategies mentioned with my book, but time will tell.

Most importantly I learned that I really need to start dabbling in the social media frontier. We were asked to pick three things to take from the workshop. Mine were, that I needed to start writing on my blog regularly again, that I needed to figure out that twitter account I set up a couple years ago, and never used, and that I need to make a website. The first two are well on their way, but the last one is a bit daunting for me. I have no idea how to create a website and nothing to put on it right now. Wish me luck.

Almost forgotten

It's been a long time since I've paid any attention to my blog. After the hype from NaNo died down I've been laying pretty low. Our planned writing group, sadly, never got off the ground although we made a couple attempts at it.
I did gather up my courage and sent out a few more queries for my finished novel, jotted down some brewing ideas for a new story and made a half assed effort at designing a book cover for The Stone Sleepers.
My first batch of queries came back negative so after nursing my pride for a couple weeks I sucked it up (again) and sent out another batch today. My skin will thicken eventually.
I've been reading like a mad fiend, blowing through 30+ books already this year. I don't understand people who give their books away, I love rereading a series from start to finish before touching the latest release.
That basically wraps up the last few months, hopefully I'll have some good news to post here soon.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)