My first story is done! It is so terrible. Really needs a massive rewrite, but not now! On to the next one.
Since tomorrow is a Sunday and I don’t write fiction on Sundays, I’ll be taking the day off. Still behind, but the gap isn’t actually that bad. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to catch up by the end of next week.
I hope NaNoWriMo is going well for you too!
Catching up slowly! I think I finally have a good idea how this first story should end. It’s a bit of a monster and definitely needs a good rewrite, but it’s also a very good start.
Fairly busy day, too. Family dinner with the in-laws took up a good chunk of the evening, and I made granola today so that took up a fair bit of the morning. But I still managed not only to get the writing in, but a couple hours of publishing tasks too. Bodes well for the rest of the month.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November! Yeah, I didn’t do so much writing today. It was a Thursday, so I wrote and sent out my email newsletter, went to the library with Mrs. Vasicek and Princess Hiccup (we go to the library every week on Thursdays), and had a rather lengthy writing group meeting online. So yeah, falling behind. And Mrs. Vasicek tells me it’s 10pm and we need to go to bed, so that’s all for now.
Decent writing day, though it would have been better if I hadn’t been so distracted in the evening by the election results. I suspect I’m not the only one doing NaNoWriMo this year who had that problem.
I would say more, but it’s late and Mrs. Vasicek is pulling me away from the computer to go to bed. Also, we have a baby who sleeps in until 6am if we’re lucky. Signing out.
Off to a bit of a rocky start, but it’s not as bad as it appears. Counting the words in my other WIP, I made about 1,600. Just had to tie it up at a good stopping place, but now that that’s done, I should be able to focus on NaNoWriMo.
The first story I’m writing is a fantasy piece pulled from an outline for a longer novel in the same universe as The Sword Keeper. I have very little idea where I’m going with it, and since I don’t want to draw it out longer than a few thousand words, that could be a problem. It has a great opening line, though:
“Everyone secretly wants to be a slave. That is the universal truth that no one wants to admit. Those who deny it simply haven’t met their true masters yet.”
I think I can finish it tomorrow, or at least get halfway. The thing about short stories is that when I get into the zone with one, I can knock off four or five thousand words easily. It turns into a race to the finish line, and since the ending is so much closer with a short story than with a novel, that enthusiasm feeds on itself until it’s done. If I don’t finish this one tomorrow, I’ll almost certainly finish it the next day.
The first day of NaNoWriMo was a Sunday this year, and I generally don’t write on Sundays, so no words today! Looks like we’re off to a delayed start.
It gets even better, though, because I had hoped to line up all of my November writing group submissions by October 31st, but last week was a bit crazy with the baby waking up at all hours of the night, so I still need to finish about 1,500 words of the next chapter in my WIP before I can lay it aside. So really, I’m more like 3k words behind, since I need to finish this chapter up before I can focus on NaNoWriMo.
So yeah, if you’re also running behind, know that you’re in good company! Now, off to write…
It’s been a long, long time since I attempted to do NaNoWriMo. Usually, I have something else on my writing schedule which prevents me from taking off a month for another project. I think my last NaNoWriMo attempt was in 2013, but even then I was juggling that with another WIP, and the WIP won out.
This year, though, I’m trying something new and workshopping my current WIP, Queen of the Falconstar, through my writing group as I write it. Since I can only workshop up to 4k words per week, I’ve been lining up a sizeable backlog that already runs through the first week of November. In the next couple of weeks, I think I can line up writing group submissions through the whole month, which frees me up to work on something else.
Instead of a novel, though, I think I’m going to shoot for 50k words of short stories. My submissions queue has dwindled down to only four stories, and it looks like I’m going to end up publishing three of those in an anthology soon since they’ve pretty much exhausted the available markets. So I really need to write more short stories.
I’ve got a couple of stories planned, but not enough to fill all 50k words, so there’s going to be a fair amount of discovery writing going on. Hopefully that helps to throw my creative mind into a higher gear, which is kind of the point of NaNoWriMo in the first place: to show that writing under pressure can actually make you more creative. Since there are also five Sundays in November, and I make it a practice not to write professionally on Sundays, that amps up the pressure yet again, since it means that I need to write more than 2k words per day.
It’s going to be a challenge, and there’s a good chance that something will come up and I won’t be able to make it, but I’m shooting for it anyway. Wish me luck!