DéJàWriMo – Day 5 Check In

 Featured, Progress & Processes, Writer's Life  3 Responses »
Dec 052010
 

So we’re five days into our sixty-two day journey of DéJàWriMo. How have you been doing?

I’ve been doing… not great, to be honest. For the first two days, I wrote nothing. On the 3rd day (Friday), I wrote a couple hundred words longhand on a break at work. Yesterday (the 4th), I concentrated on some knitting projects I’ve been working on instead.

That brings us to today. I’m pretty darned happy with today. I typed up the stuff I’d written longhand and added roughly 2000 more words.

Here’s a word count progress meter, courtesy of Writertopia. Tell me in the comments how your novel is coming along.

It’s NaNoWriMo Planning Time!

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Oct 022010
 

It’s October. You know what that means, right?

We’ve got less than a month left until November 1st and the start of National Novel Writing Month – lovingly called “NaNoWriMo” by those of us crazy enough to participate!

What does this mean?

It means I, and a few thousand of my closest friends, will be using every spare moment this November to type, scribble, scrawl or hunt ‘n peck 50,000 words of a brand new novel.

It also means that such things as laundry, dishes, holiday shopping and showers will all be forgotten in the mad rush to complete a novel and reach our goal in those short (and if you’ve never tried to write 50,000 words in a month, you don’t know how short) 30 days.

So if you have a friend, a roommate, a daughter, sister, son, brother, uncle, cousin, spouse who is participating in NaNoWriMo this year, do us all and especially them a favor and give your hope, your support, your good wishes to them this November. We’ll need it. And we also wouldn’t mind if you came over with some dinner, either. Just don’t expect us to be able to talk and scribble at the same time.

This year, I’m planning to up the stakes even more. This is my seventh NaNo’ing year, and I had this whim that perhaps working full time AND writing a 50k novel in 30 days wasn’t quite enough pressure. (HA!) So I’ve also opened a NaNo fund-raising page over at the NaNo-recommended Gift Tool site. I’ve only put in a goal of $100. I don’t know if I can manage it, but I think together we can.

If you’d like to support me, and thereby also make a contribution to a worthwhile program for young writers – which also happens to be part of a 501(c)3 organization, which makes any donation  you make tax deductible – please click here and donate what you can. I’m not picky, and neither are these young writers. Support the next generation’s authors. Even if it’s $1, or $5 or even 50 cents.

If you’d like to find out more about National Novel Writing Month – click here. If you decide you want to sign up to write your own novel, you can create an account from there.

If you have an account and are participation in NaNo this year, please add me as a writing buddy. My username is Kiaras.

And, again – if you’d like to donate to support me and the Young Writer’s program, please click here and send what you can – even if it’s the kind of donation that jingles instead of folds.

Good luck, NaNo’ers! I plan to use October for planning and outlining my novel. How about you?

A CLOCKWORK PIXIE – the 2 sentence synopsis

 Progress & Processes, Writer's Life  1 Response »
Nov 282009
 

A young girl discovers that she is the Key to travel between Earth and the realms of Faery. Upon her kidnapping by dark Fae, her brother will accept any ally to get her back – including a pixie slave with clockwork wings and a band of man-eating goblins.

Please feel free to leave your comments.

Edit: I should note that A Clockwork Pixie is a YA steampunk fantasy novel in draft 0 currently weighing in at roughly 51,000 words.

Writer's Resources for November 4th through November 11th

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Nov 112009
 

These are writers’ resource links I’ve found helpful and/or interesting for November 4th through November 11th:

Writer's Resources for October 22nd through November 2nd

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Nov 022009
 

These are writers’ resource links I’ve found helpful and/or interesting for October 22nd through November 2nd:

Writer's Resources for October 16th through October 21st

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Oct 212009
 

These are writers’ resource links I’ve found helpful and/or interesting for October 16th through October 21st:

Writer's Resources for October 8th through October 15th

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Oct 152009
 

These are writers’ resource links I’ve found helpful and/or interesting for October 8th through October 15th:

Writer's Resources for October 5th through October 8th

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Oct 082009
 

These are writers’ resource links I’ve found helpful and/or interesting for October 5th through October 8th:

Writer's Resources for September 27th through October 1st

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Oct 012009
 

These are writers’ resource links I’ve found helpful and/or interesting for September 27th through October 1st:

NaNoWriMo: Are You a Plotter or a Pantser?

 Progress & Processes, Writer's Life  1 Response »
Sep 292009
 

So pretty soon it will be October 1st, which is the day that the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) forums reset for the 2010 challenge. That means it’s time now to start thinking about this year’s NaNovel. Once the forums reset, we’ll all have 1 month to brace ourselves for the writing whirlwind.

What is NaNoWriMo?

To recap, for those who’ve never heard of it: National Novel Writing Month, widely known as NaNoWriMo, is a yearly writer’s contest in which you are given 30 days in which to pen a 50,000 word novel. NaNoWriMo begins at midnight your local time on November 1st and ends at the same time on November 30th.

There are no prizes, other than a certificate and bragging rights. There is nothing to stop you from copying other text and reporting  yourself as a winner. Except for the sheer ridiculousness of cheating in a contest for which you win absolutely nothing.

The point of the contest is to get into the habit of writing every day, as well as to use time constraints to shut down the voice of that evil inner critic every writer seems to have. I’ve participated every year since 2004.

So Are You a Plotter or a Pantser?

Everything I write tends to have a different method. My current work in progress (WiP) has been pretty thoroughly plotted. You should see all the post-its on my wall. This was a very different method for me as I’d usually not done much more than a vague outline before. I’ve also been a complete pantser in the past.

I recently discovered something called ‘phase drafting’, however, and I’m kind of interested in giving it a try. (Find out more about phase drafting here.) On the other hand, I don’t have much more than a couple of scene fragments to build from. That’s if I choose to use one of the two more developed ideas I’ve got on hold.

Yet it’s also a nice idea to be able to weave in whatever comes to mind. I find it exciting to think about writing in all the purple bunnies and ice-skating penguins that show up in the middle of the story. A completely whimsical, nonsensical story sounds enormously appealing after all the work that’s gone into plotting my current novel.

I haven’t decided on anything yet, though, and I still have a little while to make up my mind. So please join in. Are you planning to plot your NaNovel this year or write by the seat of your pants? Please leave a comment and let me know!

Note: I’m not asking for details of your plot and it’s probably best to keep that to yourself. Just tell me if you’re going to be a plotter or pantser this year! Thanks!

NaNoWriMo 2008

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Oct 102008
 

For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo – or NaNo, for short – is National Novel Writing Month. Every November, authors and aspiring authors of every caliber and from all walks of life come together at nanowrimo.org to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

Now, most professional authors know that 50k is much too small to be a “real” novel, but 50,000 words is very doable for an amatuer in 30 days. And it’s a large enough number that the work can have a beginning, a middle, and an end. For most people, getting to that elusive end is the daunting, and magical, part.

So I’ll be setting Inferno aside so that I can be focused on something new this November 1st at midnight, when the madness begins. If you’re willing to give it a try, go ahead and sign up at the link above. Even if you don’t make it to 50k, you’ll be one step closer to your goal.