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I heartily confess that after I finished my nanonovel before the deadline, I took a couple of days off from writing.  I submitted some stories to new markets and I did some reading.  Some real and actual pleasure-reading.  I finished The Grand Design by Hawking and Mlodinow and started Biopunk by Wohlsen.  I still have all those books I got at the PNBA fall show, but I’m taking things one step at a time.

I also resumed writing critiques for fellow critters on Critters.org.  I hadn’t submitted anything since I finished my work as a dedicated reader on a ya fantasy novel.  I was going to try for a most-productive-critters award this week.  That would enable me to submit a short story to the front of the queue and not have to wait the usual three weeks to start receiving critiques on it.

I’ve got two short stories that I’m going to submit as my Clarion West sample writings and I’d like to get them critiqued on Critters.  While reading through them, I realized that they’re still in need of much tweaking and not yet ready for the light of day.  Instead of going for that most-productive-critter award this week, I’m revising them.  I’ll try for that award next week when I actually have something decent to submit for critiques.

I think my writing has improved since I joined Critters, not just from the critiques I’ve received from other sf/f/h writers but also from writing critiques of other people’s stories.  When I see what works (and what doesn’t) in someone else’s writing, I think it makes it easier to find what’s working (and failing) in my own writing.  Workshoping is great, I wish there was one dedicated to sf/f/h here in Fairbanks, but I guess I have to stick with Critters online for now.

It’s been a week since I finished my NaNoWriMo novel, and I’m back in the writing groove.  This month I’m focusing on getting more short stories submitted to the markets and polishing my Clarion West writing samples.  (And crossing my fingers about the book proposal that my store’s MPS rep submitted to Tor for me, but I don’t want to say too much about that before its time…)  Proof that I’m fully recovered from NaNoWriMo 2011: I’m itching to revisit those 50,000 words and dig for the diamonds in the shit.  It’s just going to have to wait until next year.

I ended NaNoWriMo week three at 36,053 words.  Right on target.  I got to the betrayal part of the story and I don’t think it’s strong enough.  I know I can pack more tension into it.  But that’s for the rewrite.  (Honestly, there is so much for the rewrite.  I’ll start thinking about it in a couple of days.  Or weeks…)

I pushed through the last 14,000 words in five days and finished a few days early.  Yay!  50,000 words (Okay, technically it’s 50,133) in 25 days.  It’s all verified on the NaNoWriMo site and I ordered up my Winners Circle t-shirt.  By the way, the whole point of doing NaNoWriMo is for the t-shirt.

I love the challenge that is NaNoWriMo, but towards the end there, the whole process was burning me out.  I’ve had a couple of really strong days, and I wouldn’t have finished early if not for my stress-free Thanksgiving.

It was just my brother and me this year, so I did two Cornish game hens instead of a massive turkey, and some easy side dishes (quinoa-stuffed peppers, carrots, and stuffing with pecans, bacon, and currants).  Cooking only took about an hour and a half and I had the rest of the day to write, write, write.  I churned out 5,000 words.  It was fantastic.

My story is okay.  (It’s a shitty first draft, it’s not supposed to be great.)  It has a decent story arc, I love the world that it’s set in, and finally, after fifty thousand words, I think I know who the protagonist is.  I like how my characters interact.  I like how the plot moves along.  But.  But.  But I know there is much that needs improving.

I’m going to set it aside and work on some other projects in December.  Then, in the frigid days of January, when it’s so cold out that my thermometer no longer displays the temperature, I’ll dive into the revisions.  It’s mostly set in a desert world and I’m looking forward to dreaming of hot sand.

A huge sigh of relief for finishing this.  Now it’s time to get to all the housework and filing that I haven’t touched all month.  My brain has been fried.  My fingers are numb from typing.  At least I remembered to pay the bills on time.

I waded through the 17k swamp and slid down the 22k hill all the way to 25,000 words three days early.  My characters are grounded (although I’m starting to like one of the supporting characters more than the protagonist; she’s kind of a bitch and so-very-easy to write) and my setting keeps revealing more and more about the nature of their fantasy universe.  A world-encompassing conflict has arisen through the course of these 25,000 words, one that I was not expecting, and I think it makes the story deeper than it was previously.

I am working from a very loose outline.  I know the ending (no spoilers) and I know a lot about how Anom and Tinar get to it, but more characters are coming in along the way, as well as a not-so-stable pantheon.  I made up a creation myth for the Numa Se cult.  (Religion?  I still don’t know what term to use.  I like cult, but sometimes its connotations are a bit creepy.  As it’s the world’s largest established belief system, I don’t quite know how I feel about using cult.  But that’s what revision is for.)  I’ve been doing a lot of world-building and I know that a lot of these raw words will be edited out in the future, but I can’t but help feel as though they are a fantastic foundation.

Regarding the story arc, it’s a little slow-going right now.  I’ve got the gals on their way to the secret temple of the moon goddess Vyn.  There have been a couple of bumps in their road, and I’m anxious to get them where they’re going.  I’ve got a whole bunch of conflict planned, but as Vyn’s temple and worshipers are a secret sect, there’s this whole discovery thing Anom and Tinar must work through.  I can’t make it easy for them to find, right?  I think it does, however, make for a good midpoint turn in the storyline, so they’ll be getting there sooner rather than later.

I’ve been having unofficial word wars with my bff Jenn and totally kicked past her count during my travel day.  (She has subsequently passed me again, damn her!)  I was able to write 4,000 words for my nano novel during my flights back to Fairbanks from Chicago.  It was the most productive writing day I’ve had all year.  In addition to that, I got a lot of work done on another important writing project.

And then I got home and my Nanowrimo writing came to a screeching halt.  I’ve got that other writing project to finish and it’s taking a lot more thought and care than a shitty first draft.  But it’s also taking a lot less time, too.  My goal is to have the largest chunk of it (the synopsis) done this evening.  The rest of it is some simple formatting and shouldn’t take too long.  I don’t want to get more than a day behind in Nano-land, but this project is too important to delay.  I’ll be back at the Nanowrimo by the end of the week, I just hope I’m not so far behind that it begins to feel like a mountain.

The first three days of Nanowrimo went smooth as butter. The words melted out of my brain, through my fingers, and into my word processor. I was meeting the 1667 per day minimum without too much trouble, fitting in most of my writing late at night after everyone else went to bed. (I can’t believe how hard it is to get anything done around a two-and-a-half-year-old. I haven’t even picked up a knitting project! I’m supposed to be on vacation…)

I went to a write-in with Jenn and got a ton of writing done. It was a little strange, because I usually don’t write in public. I’m just not the kind of person who goes and sits in a coffee shop to write. I get too distracted people-watching to get anything done. Having a writing buddy with me really kept me on track. I wish we didn’t live 3500 miles apart and could get and write on a regular basis.

On Friday everything changed. I woke up early to watch Sammy while my sister went to school and my mom went to a doctor’s appointment. After they got home, we got in the car and drove about three and a half hours to Wisconsin Dells. And the Nanowrimo word count came to a screeching halt.

My brother Mark and his wife Allie came up and I spent time visiting with them. Then on Saturday we met up with my cousin Jill, who I haven’t seen in years, and her four children at Knuckleheads, an arcade and bowling alley. There’s an outlet mall right next to it. Retail therapy made me feel a little better, but I still had a ton of words to get through. I had a fantastic time with everyone, but there was still a little part of me that felt guilty for sitting back in the room to get through some words while they went to the water park.

We left the Dells midday on Sunday and after we got home, I spent the rest of the weekend catching up on the word count, pounding my way through almost 3,000 words well into the wee hours of the night. I’ve been able to stay on-task since then and have reached the 12,000 word mark in the novel.

It doesn’t have an official title. I’m liking Moonstruck, but I’m not married to the idea. I think I’ve been able to keep the conflict moving. (For the most part. There are a couple of places that drag a bit, but editing them out is what the second draft is for.)

The gals have invoked the god for the second time (this time they got it right) and are about to set off on the mission that he gave them, but they’ve hit a little road bump, as the High Father of their temple knows what they have done. The question for the current scene is: Will he let them go, or will there be consequences? It’s a question that I’m going to have to answer with tomorrow’s word count. Hopefully week two will go smoother than the first week, although I am proud of myself for sticking with it despite being out of town and on vacation and slave to a two-and-a-half-year-old.

Preface: NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel during the 30 days of November. I’ve participated for several years now, doing my first NaNo-Novel in 2002 and missing only two years in the interim. (As an aside, I thought my bff Jenn told me about NaNoWriMo way back in ’02. She was under the impression that I told her about it. I guess we’ll have to go back to our ancient journals to see if either of us recorded the facts at the time.)

In years past, I’ve known in advance what story I was going to work on in November. I even outlined a few of them to keep me on track. This year, due to my scramble to finish editing Strange Essence before November, I gave little thought (okay,let’s be honest here, absolutely no thought) to my NaNo-Novel. Last night, at eleven pm, one tiny hour before NaNoWriMo commenced, I made my choice.

I wrote a short story a while back called The Cupbearer of Numa Se, in which a trio of votaries angers a god’s wife. It doesn’t end too well for them. The goddess Vyn turns one of them into a moonstruck simpleton. Another gets banished to a far-away temple, and the third is relegated to the midden heaps.

I love the characters and the world I built in this story, so I’m going to use it as my starting point. My NaNo-Novel is going to begin ten years later, at the next Convocation of the god Numa Se. Two of the trio (the ones who retained the use of their brains) are going to try to right the wrongs they committed as children and return their moonstruck simpleton friend back to normalcy.

It is going to be a novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption and I’m really excited about it, now that I know what story I’m doing. (And for those of you word-count sticklers, don’t worry, I will not be counting the 5,000 words of the short story towards my NaNoWriMo word count.) Let the NaNo-Noveling Begin!

It’s been a while since I posted anything.  A very long while.  But I have a great excuse.  I’ve been working.  See, I did something really stupid, or rather, I failed to do something smart.

I store my writing on a flash drive so that I can access it on different computers.  Normally I backup the flash drive every two weeks.  November had me busy with NaNoWriMo.  In December, I was so excited about the novel I drafted during NaNoWriMo that I started in on the second draft.

I did a detailed outline, character sketches, the works.  I threw myself into it and by December 28^th I had twenty thousand words of a solid second draft done.  I was starting to think about how and who to pitch it to.  Everything was great.

Then, that fateful morning, I took my little flash drive and plugged it into the USB port and got an error message from hell:  The device you have inserted has not been formatted.  Would you like to format it now?  Hell no.  I ejected it and tried a different computer.  Different operating system, same basic message.  There’s nothing on this drive.  Disaster.

I checked my desktop’s hard drive for my last backup.  October 29th, 2010.

Some very choice words streamed from my lips.  I won’t go repeating them here.  I’m so over it.

Nick, wonderful man that he is, had the brilliant idea of taking it to one of the computer specialists in town and seeing if they could recover the data.  Called up Geek City and took it in.  They said they’d see what they could do and would probably have the drive back to me the next day.  Went home feeling all warm and fuzzy.  The Geeks were going to take care of it.

Nope.  Three days later they called, totally stumped.  They wanted to keep it for some more tests.  Sure, no worries.  I’d give them all the time in the world if they could bring back the two freakin’ months of missing data.

January 4^th they called me.  Defeated.  I had already been reworking the outline by following the notes I had taken on my phone, hoping that my rework was going to unneeded and I could laugh about it.  Such was not the case.  The Geeks gave me back my flash drive, confounded as to how it could have happened.

And so, for the last five weeks, I’ve been redoing all that work for two months.  Believe me, I’ve more than learned my lesson and am backing up my data obsessively, every other day.  It may be excessive, but I don’t want to go through that again.

There is a bright side to all this, though: The novel had time to percolate in my brain and mature and there are little changes and developments I’m making that I don’t think I would have done had I had the full first draft here to look at.  I think the story is better because of it.  When it’s done, I’ll let you read it, and you can decide.  Remember:  Backup, backup, backup.

I finished my Nanowrimo novel yesterday!  50,000 words in 28 days.  Done two whole days early.  It’s got a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it needs a whole bunch of stuff fleshed out, but it’s drafted.  I was working without a plot for the first week or so, and then without an ending for another two weeks.  When I finally figured out the ending, I wasn’t too fond of it.  Even though I like killing characters, this one didn’t seem right to me.  I put it off and put it off, and after another 10,000 words, the ending finally made sense to me.  The Commander had to die.  So, yesterday, at about 49,000 words, I killed him.  Of course, there are still loose ends to wrap up, definitely more character development and setting description needed, but that’s for the next draft.  I’ve got a skeleton of a story and plenty of writing work for this winter.  If only I could put down my knitting needles, I’m sure I could get another draft done by January.