Sunday, July 19, 2009

Word Count & Cheering Squad

Hello once again everyone.

I've been getting a fair bit of writing done over the last little while. Earlier today I cranked out a fresh scene for The Fall of Order. In my first draft, The Fall of Order had been written as a bunch of seemingly unrelated short stories about a necromancer. As I moved into the second draft, I decided that the stories were too unrelated to leave in that form. As a result, I've had a lot of work restaging while I edit.

When I sat down to get to work earlier this afternoon, I discovered that I had arrived at a point where the necessary scene had not been written. I had not written a short story involving the fate of John. As a result, I managed to crank out a pretty tightly written scene that not only revealed his fate, but also took a few steps into the past of the principal villain, revealing a part of her reason for doing what she's doing.

It ended up adding just a little over 1500 words to my novel. I'll be sitting down and editing the next scene sometime over the next hour or so. In its original incarnation, the next scene was written as a part of a writing challenge for the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society. It ran around 768 words. I figure, after editing it and weaving in the larger storyline, it'll probably end up around 1500.

A few other members of the SHS and myself got together last Thursday to figure out a way to keep motivation up for our writing. To push each other to continue to write, and to write more. One of the things we came up with was a word-count blog. As a result, Off-Week Write-Ins was born. Each of us will post our word counts daily, as well as any excuses for not having written, or thoughts about our progress. Generally the posts will be really short (ie: 726 words on The Fall of Order and 120 on "Rifters." Go me!). We also hope to meet on the off-week of the SHS meetings for mini-write-ins, just like we used to have during National Novel Writing Month. This will work much like the Monday Writing Pack that I attend, and have nothing to do with the SHS other than having a couple of same members.

The next Sudbury Hypergraphic Society meeting is this upcoming Friday. We'll probably discuss delaying the book sale until next year, and then move on to our writing or maybe some critiquing. Either way, it should be a good night with another nice word count.

Anyhow, time to get back to my writing. Wish me luck!

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Ad Astra

This weekend I head down to Toronto for the Ad Astra science fiction, fantasy and horror convention. This will be my first year attending the event and I hope to get a tonne of advice out of it. At Ad Astra, there will be numerous fans of the genres, but more importantly, writers, editors and maybe even publishers may be in attendance. It's fully possible to hang out at the bar with someone like Robert Sawyer and pick up a few tricks of trade. That's why I'm heading down there. I'm not a well-published author, nor have I had much experience in the field. There are a lot of areas within which I can learn and grow. This will be a working weekend for me. Although I would love to see the Steampunk Fashion Show, or attend the Masquerade and Dance, that's not what I'm heading down to see. Instead of enjoying that stuff, I will be attending panel after panel. Check out my time-table:

Friday Mar 27:

7:00pm Opening Ceremonies
8:00pm Paranormal Research
9:00pm Hectic Day Jobs: Sparking Creativity?
10:00pm Instant Fiction
11:00pm Urban Legends

Saturday Mar 28:

10:00am What's in a name?
11:00am Effective Combat Scenes
12:00pm How Not to Submit Your Work
1:00pm Editing Yourself
2:00pm Different Kinds of Fantasy: Epic, Urban & Everything in Between
3:00pm What is Real Evil?
4:00pm Creative Block
5:00pm Supper Break
6:00pm Strategies for Short Stories Publication
7:00pm Gore and Torture: Is it Horror?
8:00pm Free time?
9:00pm Move over Meatbrains
10:00pm Evolution of the Zombie

Sunday Mar 29:

10:00am Conflict Within
11:00am Working with a Smaller Press
12:00pm Dueling Openings
1:00 pm Marketing Yourself
2:00 pm Tesseracts Anthology
3:00 pm First Contact
4:00 pm Closing Ceremonies

Maybe next year I'll be able to take in a few of the lighter events!

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