Fiction Writing and Other Oddities

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

3 Days until NaNoWriMo



Just three more days before I start National Novel Writing Month! I'm so excited, and I'm busily trying to finish up stuff to clear the decks so I can write untrammeled and free from aggravation (other than my day job, housekeeping, and other unfortunate duties).


I'm judging a writing contest and have gotten through 4 out of the 5 entries, so I hope to finish that up before November 1. I try to read every entry at least twice and add which I hope are cogent comments. And I never take points off if it "just didn't appeal to me". But the scores are still lower than I usually give and that is making me a little nervous. I may go through one more time before I send them back just to make sure I'm not being overly harsh or critical.


The wonderful NaNoWriMo folks gave me a stupendous surprise gift on Monday. They somehow worked out a deal with CreativeSpace to let us get an actual printed paperback of the book we wrote last year for NaNoWriMo if you managed to win. Winning just requires you write 50,000 words.


So, I had an absolute BLAST putting together a cover for my book. And since I had been prepping it to send to a publisher, I had a good clean copy (as clean as I could make it, anyway, given that my brain often supplies what should be there, even if it isn't).


So...I just got my paperback in the mail! Here is the cover I created for it. I know it's not brilliant, but I rather like it. The book is not a brilliant masterpiece of insight into the human condition. It's a very light historical romance about a poetess who gets blasted by a critic and gives up writing. Eventually, she decides to move on with her life and marry. to her horror, she soon discovers that the man she decides to marry is the critic, himself.


Ah, well. What is a story without a little angst and consternation?


Anyway, it was so much fun to do this and such a nice surprise from the NaNoWriMo folks.


Now, I need to diligently get my bits of plot pieces together for my historical mystery (with a nice, light romantic sub-plot) called Twilight. I've already got some scenes burning in my brain and my fingers are itching to get to the keyboard, but I'm patiently waiting until Saturday, Nov 1, to get to work.


My little AlphaSmart keyboard is due for a real workout. My goal is to write 2,000 words (roughly 10 double-spaced pages) per day, for 30 days. It's definitely do-able as long as you don't worry about eating, sleeping or having a life outside of work.


You may ask: why the Alphie? Didn't you just buy an eeePC so you could write anywhere? Why, yes. I did. But you see the eeePC makes it attractive to *edit* while you write, which is deadly to NaNoWriMo productivity. While the Alphie makes it very hard to edit while you write since you can only see 4 lines of your writing at a time. So all you can do (effectively) is write fresh stuff on an AlphaSmart, as opposed to polishing and otherwise wasting time fussing with previously written material on an eeePC or PC or laptop device.


During the next four weeks, then, I will have only the briefest of blogs since my fingers will be worn to nubs typing new, mind-bogglingly brilliant prose. I will try to keep up-to-date, though, on my progress.


Then, when NaNoWriMo ends, my Christmas novella, Christmas Mishaps, will be out from Cerridwen press! That's due out Dec 3, so I'm pretty excited about that. I don't have a cover, yet, but I'm hoping to have one soon to plaster everywhere.


Hope everyone is doing well and exciting about Halloween and all the wonderful fall festivals. This is my absolute favorite time of the year. I love the cooler weather, fall foliage, and just basically feel GREAT!


Best wishes and have a spooky Halloween!


Amy

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