Tag: Nanowrimo 2013

I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo

I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo because … yeah, I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo.

I’ve been doing a lot to get the print versions of the Star Wanderers novellas up, but beyond that, not a whole lot of writing.  Still one scene to go in Sons of the Starfarers: Brothers in Exile (that’s the working title, anyway), but I keep putting it off because … I dunno.  So many other things going on, maybe?  Sometimes it’s the easy stuff you put off the longest, sometimes, the hardest stuff.  But I already said I wasn’t going to talk about nanowrimo …

In any case, I set Thanksgiving as the deadline to get all the print versions out for Star Wanderers, and it looks like I’ll be able to hit it.  Outworlder, Fidelity, Sacrifice, and Homeworld are already up, and should propagate to Amazon in the next couple of days.  Dreamweaver is in the proofing process, and I should be able to typeset Benefactor and Reproach in the next couple of days.  It’s a relaxing thing to do while listening to podcasts, and the books are short enough that I can get all the work done in just a few hours.

In December, I hope to release a new Star Wanderers book: Deliverance, which covers the events of Homeworld from Mariya and Lucca’s points of view.  This was a fun one to write, so I’m looking forward to getting it out there for you guys to read.  It’s with my first readers now, who should get back to me by the first week of December or so.  The draft is already pretty clean, so unless they bring up some major issues, I should be able to get it out fairly quickly.

And after that, I think I’m going to take a break from the Star Wanderers universe for a while to work on some novels.  It’s been fun doing the shorter stuff, and I’ll definitely return to the novella form in the future, but there are a bunch of unfinished projects screaming at me to work on them.  First among them is probably Heart of the Nebula, which I haven’t even touched in almost a year.  It needs a huge overhaul–I’ll probably scrap a good half or so from the middle, probably more.  But the ideas behind the story are solid, and I would really like to get another Gaia Nova novel out soon.

But the one that’s calling the most to me is probably Lifewalker.  That’s the post-apocalyptic one with the guy wandering down the ruins of I-15 with a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn toward a Las Vegas populated by cannibals.  There’s actually a lot more to it than that, but that’s the 10 second pitch I’ve been giving people.  The voice on that one was so different from anything else I’ve done, I had to take a break from it after I got to a good stopping place.  But recently, it’s been calling out to me to finish it.  I’ll probably move on to that one if I don’t go to Heart of the Nebula first.

Then there’s Edenfall, The Sword Bearer, a couple of other untitled ones, that Sword & Planet story I said I’d write … holy crap, so many unfinished books.  I feel like I’m a bad writer whenever I don’t finish everything I start, but that just seems to be part of my process.  Hopefully none of my readers are too impatient to get any particular book–although, come to think of it, that kind of pressure might be just what I need.

Either way, I really need to get back to writing.  But I already said I wasn’t going to talk about nanowrimo (I wonder if this blog post counts?)

😛 Later.

Nanowrimo is kicking my butt

… but that’s a good thing.  While procrastinating my daily word count, I’ve almost finished Book I of Sons of the Starfarers, formatted and orders proofs for the first four Star Wanderers novellas, alpha-read most of another book for a friend, and done a bunch of other things (which is nothing compared to a friend of mine, who procrastinated by getting a job).

Right now, I’ve got about 3,500 words written, which means I need to write about 2,000 words a day in order to hit 50k words before the end of the month.  Actually, that shouldn’t be too hard–most of the difficulty of writing is just getting out of the way, so when I put my hands on the keyboard and say “whatever you do, DON’T STOP WRITING,” good things actually happen.  At a nanowrimo get-together at Dragon’s Keep in Provo, I knocked out 1500 words in about an hour using that method.  It’s actually quite liberating–I should do it this way more often.

So why only 3,500 words, instead of the 11,666 that I’m supposed to have?  Because I REALLY REALLY REALLY have to finish this Sons of the Starfarers book, and that’s been taking up virtually all of my time and mental space.  I hit the action stuff a couple of days ago, and things were just flowing, but now it’s that last crucial scene and I’m not quite sure how to pull it off.  Probably I’ll write something and change it later, or tell myself that at least so I can just finish it and move on.

But UURGHH!

Anyways, that is all.  Back to writing.

Nanowrimo anyone?

November is coming up, and with it, nanowrimo.  I’ve always wanted to participate, but every time it rolls around, it seems like I’ve got another project going on that’s more important.

This year is no exception, but I think I have a way around that.  The goal for nanowrimo is just to write something–it doesn’t have to be any good.  I’ve got a bunch of projects I’m currently working on, including Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII) which I hope to publish by Thanksgiving, but I think I can still do a just-for-fun sort of thing on the side, with the understanding that it doesn’t have to be serious.

What I think I’ll do is write a story where all of the characters from all of my previous books get caught up in some sort of a weird time-space dimensional warping thing, so that they end up in books where they don’t belong and universes where they never existed.  It should be a fun way to revisit some of them, especially the ones from the Gaia Nova books, which I haven’t really done much with in a while.

It’s probably not going to make much sense to anyone who hasn’t read my books, but who cares?  That’s not the point.  I may or may not put it up somewhere for people to read, but it may have some stuff from projects that are either unfinished or unpublished, so it might be a little obtuse even for the fans.  However, it seems like a really fun project, one that I can really run with, and that’s all that really matters for nanowrimo.

As far as my other projects go, right now I’m working on a heroic fantasy novel that’s a prequel of sorts to The Sword Bearer.  I have no idea where it’s going to go, but I’m taking a page from my favorite writer of all time (David Gemmell), with lots of violence, lots of blood, and lots of true grit and heroism.

At the same time, I’m still working on Sons of the Starfarers off and on, though I may end up putting that one on hold for a while as I figure things out with this heroic fantasy story.  It will get done, though–it’s definitely a story I’m itching to tell.  In a couple of reviews and emails, readers have asked whether I’ll ever write an origin story for the Hameji.  Well, that’s what Sons of the Starfarers is going to be, though the connection might not happen until well into the series.

There’s a couple of other Gaia Nova books I’ve been meaning to write for a long, long time, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to them anytime soon.  This nanowrimo project might spark something, though, since I’ll be revisiting a lot of those old characters.  And even if the nanowrimo novel itself is pretty bad, if it gets those projects on the back burner simmering again, then that will definitely be something.

Dang, I really want to get started with nanowrimo now!  So many wacky ideas … it’s like writing fanfiction for one of your own books!  In any case, I’d better get back to writing before I get too excited.  Don’t want to spend so much time thinking about writing that it becomes hard when I actually sit down to do it.

Later!