NaNo ’12: Progress Report

One third of the way (time wise) through NaNoWriMo ’12 and I’ve almost hit the half way mark as far as word count goes. Might hit it tomorrow, might not. Hell, I could take a couple days off writing if I wanted to and still be on track.

Anyway. Had a bit of a rough start to NaNo this year. I got two days in and realised my POV was completely fucked and had to rewrite several scenes (while keeping the cut ones in my ‘shit-but-keep-for-word-count’ folder). Yesterday I realised my story was completely and utterly boring, and while my wordcount was rocketing along quite happily, I wasn’t actually saying anything.

If in doubt, add ninjas. So my fantasy world just got invaded. Not actually by ninjas in this case, but you get the picture. Now, my three boys have to somehow get out of the magically impenetrable castle I locked them in, AND THEN fight off the invading barbarian hordes.

And there’s gonna be some sex in there somewhere, too. Before fighting off the invading barbarian hordes. I have epic fuckloads to look forward to! I can’t wait!

Hubby expressed concern over my impending battle scenes. I think he’s under the impression I can’t write that sort of thing because I’m a girl. Pfft.

Oh, I procrastinated yesterday by watching several episodes of Teen Wolf and making cover art.

NaNo 11: Calendars and Timelines

I suck at timelines. I usually end up with scrawled lists on bits of paper and so far I haven’t inserted a timeline in any of my story bibles except for the one that spans 5000 years (and that’s just to keep track of my vampire family trees). But as I was picking through my day planner while planning my latest (and hopefully ‘the one’ since I have what? A day to get distracted?) NaNo plot bunny, I realised what I needed was a calendar.

So I went to FreePrintableCalendar.net and printed off six months worth.

Oh. My. God. So freaking easy to plan out the major events in my book and so bloody logical I have no idea why it’s never occurred to me before. I’ve pasted these into the back of my story bible and once again, I’m filling them in as they come to me.

This will possibly be my last blog post (except for Flash Fiction Fridays—I’ll keep doing those as long as people keep writing for it) before NaNo. I start writing at midnight tonight (but that’s past my bed time, so perhaps first thing in the morning) and I don’t know how much time I’ll have for blogging.

I’ve decided to write under my original fiction penname for NaNo this year. Some of you know it already, if you do, you’re one of the lucky few ;)

Anyway, thanks for hanging about during the lead up to NaNoWriMo, it’s been heaps of fun :D

I’m Back

A little earlier than I’d planned, but at least one of the things I took the time off to do is close to being complete. That would be writing related (I’m entering an original fiction contest). The other thing, the RL thing, I am complete fail at, but that’s nothing unusual!

So I came back to a ton of reviews to reply to, still slowly getting through them, and a couple of rec’s scattered around the place :D

Indie Fic Pimp featured Say Something Else, tweeted it all over the show, and yeah, it was a ‘writer submission’ (go the self-pimpage) but Einfach Mich (I adored her already, this just makes me love her more) wrote a marvellous review for it.

hidingfromsomeone had her turn at Guest Author Rec’ing at Twislash Unveiled, and very kindly mentioned Say Something Else.

Dead Battery was reviewed at TwiWrite Headquarters by Girlnorth (brace your eyeballs for the fist pic featured and just keep scrolling—it gets better!)

And last, but by no means least, both Firelight and The Way of Virtue were featured in the Lemon Report on The Perv Pack’s Smut Shack. Oh boy, this made me squee so loud! Thank you Chele and Jen for reviewing two of the fics closest to my heart (especially considering one of them I expected flames for, not recc’s!)

I should go away more often, huh? ;)

Fic: Untitled Zombie Flash

Original fiction written with the prompts: 

topic: christmas morning
setting: fresh fallen snow
character: flesh eating zombie

NaNo: Thank god it’s OVER!

Well that was a very different experience from last year. What a balls up! I picked the wrong story, didn’t give a shit about my characters, wrote utter shite…

Yeah.

There is a salvageable story in there, though in no way will it reflect the word count I reached.

So, filing that bastard till…I dunno. February or something.

But I’m left with a bit of a lost feeling. The urge is to write, because that’s what I’ve been doing for so long, but I feel like I need to take a break. I have my yuletwi’d exchange fic drafted already, and I have to revise that, and soon (Dec 20th deadline, and it’s freaking me out). Revision and editing is a whole other thing from writing, so that should be kinda good.

Then, at some stage soon, I have a certain promised Alec POV SSE outtake to complete :D And then I better dive back in to the mindfuck that is Beautiful Dangerous O.O

 

Nano: end of week 3

I suppose I should do a screen cap, and fire up the Gimp, and upload the pic, and stuff.

But I’m buggered! (<–that means tired. JSYK)

So, I’ll tell you that I’m at 81k or so, and my story is still a big old fricking mess. I reckon I’ll be lucky to get a 10k short story out of it, there is so much crap in there.

I either overwrite to death, or I am brief to the point of ridiculousness. In the words I wrote tonight (last night, technically, but it’s only just gone midnight), which was only about 2.5k, I cremated a king, created a god, and broke my POV character’s heart.

Yeah. Methinks there will be some fleshing out of that come December. Or January. Or June, when the createspace deadline is looming.

Oh! I should say, some truly inspired people have organised a slashy (boy and girl) christmas fic exchange, in which I both submitted a prompt (that got snaffled up pretty quick-YAY!), and grabbed one to write. I can’t tell whose I got or what I’m writing, but if you know me at all, I’m sure you can guess that I’m not writing AH :D Of course, neither did I request one, so I’m looking forward to having a couple more stories to add to the vampslash list come January.

Ooh, link would help! Make the Yuletwi’d Gay. Lot’s of prompts left to write, some scrummy alternate pairings sitting there for the taking! And leave a prompt, too :D

Nano: half-way

So, this is where I am today:

I almost flounced the other day. Thank god for venis-envy, who kicked my butt and made me cross the winners line with my original story rather than something else, which I was || close to doing.

Because then, of course, I actually started hating my story less. I’ve gone all non-linear, which I generally don’t do, but hey, whatever works. I’m currently writing the HEA epilogue before I’ve gotten the POV character out of the shit.

Oh yeah, I went and changed my POV character a couple thousand words ago, too. But it’s not like I wasn’t going to be rewriting most of the story anyway.

I hope to be finished with this story by the end of week three, then do either a short story or do some more on a half done novella I’ve been sitting on for months and months.

NaNo ’10 – end of week one

Check me out, seven days in:

Yeah, okay, so 90% of that is complete and utter shite (I’ve discovered, or had confirmed, that I am a pre-writer. I have to write a whole shit-ton of words before I actually get a handle on my characters and my story), but the last couple of k isn’t going straight in the trash at the end of November, so, yay!

And I found a title today. Double yay!

NaNo ’10: Day One

I started NaNo kind of with a bang. I’ve been hanging out for 12:01 1st November for ages, and spent my last day transcribing notes and compiling a list of names for peripheral characters should they pop up.

Then at 9pm I joined the IRC chat kick-off party for kiwi wrimos, and that sucked ass, so I flounced that and killed the final two hours with a couple episodes of Queer as Folk.

Midnight came, and I opened scrivener and stared at a blank page for a few minutes.

And then, though I’d had the opening scene in my head for days, I wrote it down all wrong…

But, with an attempt to drag the scene back to where it was supposed to go, I eventually got 1700 words, and so at 2:17 am, I called it quits and went to bed. I feel like I’m a day ahead of myself. Would be nice to get tomorrows word count before midnight tonight.

 

NaNo Prep

Today I’ve been hanging out on babynames.com, SWFA, and Fantasy Map Maker.

I’m writing a freaking fantasy for NaNoWriMo. Never really thought about writing a fantasy before. It won’t be epic, by any means, I’m going for novella length (after revision and edits–I always drop in wordcount then) so can’t go too bananas with the world building. There’s gonna be elves! Holy shit, I’m writing elves O.O

And strangely, not freaking (yet).