Post NaNo Recovery

Here it is! Finally, after a lot of work, numerous write-ins and a couple of parties, National Novel Writing Month is complete. It was a hell of a month. And by a hell of a month, I mean a great experience I can only hope to repeat and better in future years. This blog is all about what I've been doing this past month, and how I've gone about creating some good writing habits.

The first piece of advice any author is likely to give anyone hoping to get into writing is this: write every day. NaNoWriMo is all about getting into that habit. For every day of November, the goal is to write at least 1,667 words. By November 30th, you need to be above 50k words in order to call the month a success. In addition to a difficult letter, and numerous e-mails as the Municipal Liaison for the Sudbury area, I wrote 70,195 words. Now that the month is over, you would think that would mean that I'm finished with my NaNo novel. You'd be wrong.

You see, my novel, or rather novels, are not done. The first book of the trilogy is skeletanized, with a first draft outlining a lot of the basic events as they are supposed to happen, and it contains a number of scenes that need to be cut, and holes that need to be filled out. The second book, I'm only about half-way through skeletanizing. The third book I haven't even started yet, and I'm good with not starting it until a few months into 2010.

So, I've a few goals for myself to work through. This month, I need to get through skeletanizing the 2nd book. I started it, I need to walk it through to the ending. I don't need to write at the same pace that I bashed my way through November, but I do need to get a fair number more words done. I'm aiming at about 30,000 more words. I figure once I'm at 50k, I'll have a good skeleton that walks me through the 2nd part of my trilogy.

I also plan to go through my first book, or the first 50k words of NaNo, and start crossing out the scenes I want to cut out. So I'll be getting that thing printed up and I'll do a brief read through. I won't be doing any major revisions, just crossing out and re-outlining the plot. I figure that's something that I can do during my breaks at work, so that's how I plan to take care of it. When I'm home, I have other priorities.

The Monday Night Writing Pack is starting up again. It will once again be an informal thing, and for most of December it looks unlikely that I'll be able to attend. Seems the boss thinks I need to be in on Monday nights for some reason. Not a big deal really, but I'll try to get my butt out to the library as often as I can. I'm promising myself at least two good evenings devoted to writing every week, with a minimum of an hour a day. I did it for all of NaNo, so I can do it some more.

So what are these novels about? The first one focuses on a werewolf taking revenge. The second one focuses on a reckoning of witch covens in Sudbury. The third part I'll have to look at a coming of age story for the young werewolf-child. Not sure if that's quite the route I want to take with the third story, but the second one kind of went into the realm that I originally wanted to take the third book to, and the first novel didn't end quite how I had originally plotted it. Funny how things can change while you're writing.

Basically, I have to say that I'm super impressed with this year's event. Not only were there excellent turn outs at ALL of the events I setup, and not only did I make a tonne of writing friends, and not only did I have fun, but I actually managed to crank out a pretty good skeletal draft of a novel that I'm not so sick of I never want to see it again. Over the next few months, I'm going to be cranking out the remainder of book 2, editing book 1, and maybe even editing book 2. Then, maybe next November, or maybe during Script Frenzy in April, I'll crank out Book 3.

I've got high hopes. Let's see them come to light.

NaNo Day 6

Welcome back everyone!

Today is Day 6 of National Novel Writing Month . As you all know by now, I'm Sudbury's Municipal Liaison, which means that I had to organize all sorts of stuff for the upcoming month. So far, they've been playing out really well. I've been super impressed with most of my writers this year, with 14 of them above goal so far, and another 13 with at least half of goal. I know a few of the writers under that are likely to shoot up over the course of this weekend, and I look forward to hearing about their successes.

We held our launch party early on October 23rd. It was attended by a nice handful of people, though not quite as many as I had hoped. Ken, Andy, Miriam, Steph, Julia, and Randy made it out to keep me company, as did a few non-writers. It was a good gathering, and most of us already knew each other from last year.

On Nov 1st, the Underground Writers held their own pot-luck kick-off at Sylvie's place. We got off to a good start, with great food and excellent motivation. In attendance were Sylvie, Steph, Randy, Andy and myself. Aura was on her way out, but unfortunately we were wrapping up by the time she was heading our way.

The first official write-in was on the evening of Nov 2nd at the New Sudbury Library. It was an absolutely awesome showing! Mike showed up and said hi, but the people that stuck around and wrote included Heidi, Andrew, Rebecca, Julia, Meghan, Angelique and myself. We pretty much took over a whole corner of the library.

An impromptu write-in occurred in the early morning on Tuesday at the Tim Hortons downtown. I know that Aura and Miriam were in attendance, but I'm not sure who the other person was. I wasn't there, being asleep and getting rested up for the next day's work.

Thursday night was the weekly Underground Writers meeting, and though it was sparsely attended by just Steph, Randy and myself, it was incrediably productive for all of us. Sure it started and ended with the usual chatter, but we all cranked out a fair number of words. Definitely awesome, and I love how the group is doing exactly what it was formed to complete.

For word wars, things have been going pretty well for Sudbury so far. We've pretty well clinched the war against NY Southern Tier, though they do have a chance at catching up. For overall total, I think we've got the win. But for words per person and top 10, they have a chance of turning the tide. It'd be hard and they'd really have to push themselves, but they can do it.

Our word war against North Bay is a little more uncertain. It's only taking the top 10 into account, and I've seen a few of their higher word counts. We've got a lot of work if we're going to pave our way past them and to non-singing safety. On the bright side, they seem to be roadblocking as their average word count has been stalling over the last few days. Their leads may be dipping a bit in enthusiasm.

Tomorrow marks our second official write-in, this time at William's Coffee Pub. From what I'm seeing so far, we have about 7 or 8 people that are likely to show up. Steph will unfortunately be out of town and watching the Senators beat another team in Ottawa, so she'll be missing another write-in. No word on the other members of the UW, but I'm pretty sure most will be able to make it out.

It's been a hell of a pace to keep up. To make things even more fantastic, I have been writing every day. I'm currently sitting at 15,741 words, and average 2,624 words a day. I seem to be getting that in about an hour's worth of writing. Saturday promises a lot more than an hour's worth of writing. I call that sweet. I also call a goal of 5k for tomorrow. I want to end the week at 20k or higher.

This works out pretty good since tomorrow is double your daily day. Tomorrow WriMos are supposed to write double their normal daily average. That means I should try to write 5,248 words tomorrow. Maybe I should stretch for 5,259 so I can end the day at 21k... Decisions, decisions.

Anyhow, I have to go write another ML e-mail. It's been a while and I don't want my flock to think I've abandoned them.

Helpful Critiques

The Underground Writers has had their first critiquing session. This was something that we all felt was missing from the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society, so we made sure to put concrete deadlines for something to be submitted to the group for critiquing. I believe I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I had rushes to finish a draft of "Bloodspurt" for this particular session. Well, the word has come back from the group. They were entertained, always a good sign, but they could tell that it was definitely a rough draft. It was obvious where I started rushing to the ending, and numerous small comments came up about different parts and people's preferences.

Overall, I was pretty impressed actually. I knew there were a lot of problems with the piece, but I would have missed about half of what they mentioned. The pieces I critiqued were all pretty well polished in comparison with my draft, so I feel really bad about hogging so many useful comments. Everyone received their fair share though. A piece here, a transition there, some dialog, some character... There was a little for everyone to work on, and from what I'm hearing, most can hardly wait to do it again.

I almost have my piece ready for the next deadline. "Tactical Medics" took a slightly different route from the one I had originally anticipated, but I am very impressed with what I've managed to crank out this time. It feels a lot more polished, and pending a quick read-through by a regular reader, I'm pretty confident this piece will be a little better for the group to scrape through. I have the third draft sitting in front of me, and it's been chewed down to 4,027 words from 4,183. I had to add a couple of paragraphs to make the ending a little more foreshadowed, and to give the characters a little more character. I may need to look at their dialog a little more to differentiate between the two primary characters, but I'm not overly concerned. Gonna look at that when I move from third to fourth draft.

Submissions Outs

It's time for another of the many periodic updates of writing in my neck of the woods. There's been a few ups and downs since my last entry, and I hope to cover them all without sounding like I'm bragging or whining, a difficult feat. I just hope I don't forget to cover something important.

First off, in regards to The Fall of Order, I've managed to squeeze out a measely 2044 words since my last update. So much stuff has been going on in the real world that I've been struggling to bring myself to edit this piece. Still going to crank away at it. I actually have two hours tonight set aside to work on this project. I'm hoping to get past the roommate's story and move into a nice little betrayal scene. Should be fun stuff. Wish me luck.

For my NaNo novel, I've come up with a sort of "Epiphany Summary" and drawn the main ideas out of the main group of character's epiphanies. These will be something of a guide for the novel. If a scene doesn't somehow move one of the character's closer to their epiphany, or have them get blocked in trying to reach that goal, then the scene should have no place in the book. I then scribbled down a list of some 32 scenes, 11 locations, and 9 research topics I'm going to have to dig into. I took a bit of time the other day to do some research at The Townhouse. Since one of the characters comes from the big city, I was thinking of making her a bit of a metal-head. Went out to a Wolven Ancestry concert and scribbled notes while I pretended to drink. Not sure if I'll use those notes in this story, but it's still useful research. Floated the story synopsis by a few writers and got some nods and "neats." Not overly useful criticism, but I can trust them to tell me "It's not my kind of thing" if it's a shitty idea, so I think I'm safe.

I've also begun work on a couple of pieces of flash fiction. One story, entitled "Bloodspurt" managed 485 words in the skeletal draft. The other piece I've barely touched on and sits around 118 words so far. I hope to clean up "Bloodspurt" and have it ready for submission by late-September. The second piece, I hope to have cleaned up and ready for submission by the end of October. That should leave me free to work on NaNo during November. I also have two short articles of approximately 150 words taking opposite sides on the Death Penalty debate that I may be able to put aside for a piece some point in the future.

Yesterday I sent four poems (Arrogance, Tinted Mirror, Invisible Eris, and Two Days) to poetry magazine. They have an 8-week response time, so by October 5th, 2009, I should know whether or not they'll be picking up any of my work. I have hope for two of the four poems that I sent. The other two, well, I had been told they were worthwile a couple years ago but never made use of them. I don't feel as good about them as the people that told me to send them, but we'll just have to wait and see. According to the site, they pay $10/line, minimum $300 (though the Writer's Market says min $150). If all were accepted, I'd be looking at a $760 US cheque. That's nice to think about, but I'm not going to count on anything. Just going to keep scribbling some poetry and see if it takes me anywhere.

On the writing group and arts Sudbury side of things, there's been something of a cataclysm. The Sudbury Hypergraphic Society has split between those who beleive the point of the group is to write, and those who beleive the point of the group is to promote arts activities and their own work locally as a non-profit organization. I had always thought the purpose of the group was to inflict hypergraphia (a neurological disorder whereby one is unable to stop writing) upon ourselves, and thus fell firmly in the first camp. It's sad to see something that I helped form rip itself apart, but many of us have seen it coming for a couple months but had been hoping that it would blow over. It hasn't and thus a split has become necessary. Unfortunately, that means I have two red shirts with the SHS ironed across them that I now need to toss at Value Village.

On the bright side, the new writing-side of the group has agreed to meet weekly instead of bi-weekly. We will be writing and critiquing. That is our goal, our purpose, and our endeavour. We will see ourselves published when we are ready, and we will support each other in our writing endeavours. The "Underground Writers" as our blog has been called for the past 26 days, will continue to carry on the spirit that many of us though the SHS was supposed to embody.

That pretty much brings everything up to date. Time to get to work on editing The Fall of Order. Stay tuned for future updates.

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!