Orycon 35

Okay INKers, it's Orycon time again. Orycon has a really nifty online program. Hopefully this link will take you straight to my schedule, forever. Maybe. As long as it lasts, anyway. I'm not sure if the individual program schedules stay on their respective websites forever, or if they get overwritten by the current year. I suppose I could go test it out, but ... meh. Anyway, I have a reading. A fifteen minute reading. I'm more than a little nervous about that. Put me in front of lots of people to blather about pretty much any ol' subject, I'm good. Put me in a room with 1-12 people where I read my stuff aloud? I get all shaky and shy. What's with that? It's not like my words on the page are all that different from the words I say out loud during a panel. Are they? What's the difference?

Maybe in conversation and on panels my words have no soul, no emotion, no life. Zombie words. But on the page they come alive! They have fears and courage, pleasure and pain ....

It seems kind of backwards. I mean, I've had time to revise and polish words on the page (though I'm not supposed to, ahem, do too much of that.) In theory I'm prepared, right? All I have to do is read those words. I'm much more likely to make a fool of myself saying something wrong while yammering on. And yet, I'm more nervous about the works that I picked carefully. Very weird.

Maybe it's because I wrote them without any feedback. I mean, you can get feedback after the fact, but that's not the same as talking. When you're talking, you have the opportunity, even if you can't or won't take advantage of it, to read your audience's expression and reactions and adjust accordingly. When you're writing a book or short story, you just keep marching on and hope that you aren't marching right off a cliff.

Or maybe I'm just being silly. That wouldn't surprise me in the least.

I'm also Nanowrimo-ing. I've got a personal goal of 80,000 words this time. It's kinda touch-n-go as far as whether I'll make it or not. I'm on track for 50,000 so far (can't get cocky, especially this early on. Remember the time my office flooded? Yeah, me too) but behind if I want to make the eighty. And so I'll spend part of my time at Orycon adding words.

This year I'm doing something YA-ish. I'm not convinced it *is* YA. I'm not familiar enough with YA to make that call. But that's not my job. Right now my job is to write. Lots. Lots and lots.

Which I should go back to, but I think instead I'll make some tea because my butt is going numb.

See some or all of you at the con!

Finally, We're All Published.

Two hours before NaNoWriMo begins and I'm told Andromeda Spaceways #48 is out containing "Ash" my first published short story. How's that for writing motivation? Last of the INK group to become a published author, but better late than never, right? Thanks INKers for helping me grow as a writer. Today, I'm an author!

Accountability Cam is up and running at http://www.cscole.com/. I'll probably write for a couple of hours after midnight (less than an hour away now) and return around noon tomorrow after the daily workout. Finally preparations in order now. Go INK NaNo-ers!

Loving the Process

I'm a short story's length within the 50,000 word Nanowrimo goal. How long the book will turn out to be, I really have no clue. Normally I have all kinds of clue by the 40,000+ word mark. I think I'm about 2/3rds done, but depending on how the plot twists and turns, I might only be halfway, or I might be within 20,000 words of The End.

Nanoing this year has felt a little weird, but a good weird. I feel really free. I've accepted the idea that I have enough writing skills that I don't have to rewrite something to death. If I go back through, it'll be to clean up details, not to 'polish.'

If I think about it in terms of rice, I like brown rice way better than the super-polished stuff anyway. Wild rice is full of awesome too. Somewhere along the way I stopped learning and improving when I rewrote something and started making my writing worse. I've had this proved to me many times now. So, enough.

That gives me much more time to develop new work and play in new stories and revisit ideas that I loved but sadly polished into a little bead that had about as much life in it as expired corn starch. That allows me to move on to the next story, whether it's the next in a series or the next in a whole new universe. And if I want to enrich a story with details or something, I'll have more time to do that if I'm not obsessing on the line by line on an extensive polish.

It's made me a little more careful about how I write those words as they land on the page, but it hasn't slowed me down all that much. Again, I've got over 43,000 words on the 16th day of Nanowrimo, and I haven't been writing non-stop. We've done housework and gone to meetings and such. I've been living a pretty normal life. I've been sick too.

I can do this. I can be a full time writer with this process, and produce more good stuff that I've ever dreamed I could. Plus, I'm not going back and ruining what I do write. Bonus!

But I'll always need my critique group, I think. I need to keep a sharp eye on what I miss, and what doesn't work, especially if it's a pattern with me. I already know I could do a lot more with setting. So as I go forward, I'm going to keep hunting for those weaknesses, and I'll depend on the Lucky Labs and INKers to help me out (and keep me motivated too.)

Ready, Set, NaNoWriMo Begins.

4188 words this morning logged in beginning at the stroke of midnight. Naturally, as the past three years tradition holds, I can't log into the NaNoWriMo.org website to register anything and countless email requests for a new password has been sent. If this year is anything like last year, come day eleven, I'll get a flurry of email replies with countless password resets. Anything received earlier would just get lost in the typical NaNo server crash(es). So typical. So NaNo season!

Whew...

I just went over the 50,000 word mark for NaNoWriMo. This is my fifth year and simply getting started on I will remember it as a most challenging NaNoWriMo effort.

I could pass it off as difficult because of a busy work schedule, but I think it’s a bit deeper than that. I think that the difficulty this year is coming from being out of practice more than anything else.

Coming off of last year’s Orycon, I set several personal writing goals, the most notable was a goal of writing 1,000 words a day. It didn’t go so well and fell by the wayside long ago. I had managed to make it well past the three-week length that was supposed to help form the daily writing into a habit, but the habit quickly became more about battling to stay up late every night, hammering away at a keyboard that resisted me every step of the way. I fell further and further behind everything else that was going on at the time while I grew more depressed about my sagging writing commitment.

When I ultimately let it go, I let slide a number of other writing objectives as well. All the while, I looked forward to November as that time of the year I knew I'd be attracted back to writing, but as November approached, the planning for the upcoming novel effort as was a foreign process. I entered midnight of November 1 with only a vague idea of where I wanted to go with the story.

It took slogging through it to get to the point where the flow had once again returned and I'm not finished yet. But the advice for anyone who cares a whit is not to give up. Slog through it. It will become easier and you will feel better for the effort.

Go INKsters and Go NaNo-ers!!

Eating The Words.

NaNo and 45,000 words. So close to the finish line I can smell it. Oh wait, that's the burning roasting cauliflower and leeks in the oven.

A few weeks ago I mentioned to Kami about my theory of the importance of eating healthy and exercising during November's National Novel Writing Month and how I felt that just perhaps, all that talk of chocolate and caffeine consumption to get us writers through to the finish line wasn't in everyone's best interest.

I proposed that junk food, sugar, caffeine, and lack of movement be limited somewhat to see if we all could get through NaNo's weeks two and three without the expected petering out or near total meltdown in word count. I would never propose a complete 180 degree change in eating habits just for the month because well, your mileage may vary, vastly in fact, and fainting from lack of chocolate cake is a poor excuse for not writing.

I don't know if it worked for anyone else but it seemed to be a rousing success here at home. It's a plan I'll follow for many more Novembers to come.

Go INKsters!

Insomnia

Insomnia.

I very, very rarely get insomnia.  Ask my better half.  When I go to bed, with rare exception I go to sleep with ease, and except for a night walk or two I sleep through to morning.  Sometimes I sleep very shallowly, not quite full-under, which may or may not have triggered some dizzy spells way back when.  The source of those dizzies was never fully explained.

Anyway, I slept for about three hours and then inexplicably woke up full riot.  Maybe it was the strange, reality-twisted dream that inspired thoughts of a bizarre flash erotica horror.  Maybe it was that I stayed up very late the night before, slept late, and went to bed early tonight.  Threw off my cycle.  Under usual circumstances I'd be thinking dangit, I'm going to be messed up for the next few days.

But it's not usual circumstances.  It's Nano!  So after about an hour of reading with no luck recapturing the sleepies, and another hour of tossing and turning, I called b.s. on trying to go back to sleep, dressed in comfies and dashed down here to write.    I can gnash my teeth, tear my hair and throw ashes on my head tomorrow when I try to accomplish some stuff.  For now I'll take advantage of the distraction-free quiet, and the echoes of dreams half-lived in tesseract time.

I'll add on a reminder:  Nano meeting coming up this Friday!  Got word count?

It's the Night

Tonight at midnight Nanowrimo begins.  Good luck INKers and friends of INK!

NaNo Brainstorming Rocks!

Awesome evening spent at Kami's brainstorming and outlining our NaNo stories. Good food shared with good conversation in front of a warm, crackling fire (with good pet accompanyment) made for a great time! We made strong headway I think. If we don't watch out, we all just might have novels circulating out there sometime next year.

Thanks again Kami! Your downstairs library/study room is incredible and the vibe fantastic for writing.

INK sponsors an Open House for Nanowrimo

Come one, come all to the INK Open House for Nanowrimo!  Food, drinks, and fun!  October 24, 2008, 6pm, Kami's house.  If you need directions or other details, email kamila at easystreet dot net.  The plan is to discuss our Nano projects for this year, do a little outlining and brainstorming if necessary, and generally prepare to sit down, shut up and write.  Kami lives in the Columbia River Gorge not far from east Vancouver, WA.  If you want to learn about or participate in Nanowrimo, this is a good first step.

The Kickoff Party for Nanowrimo in Vancouver, WA is on the 27th.  See the Nanowrimo web page for details.  There are also lots of write-ins scheduled, including some for midnight when it officially becomes Nov. 1 (your local time.)  Kick off parties and write-ins are happening all over the world, so if you're not local to me, check out your region and see what's what.

Adrenaline is my friend

I had my first panicked OMG Nanowrimo is in single digit days moment.  I have an idea, a plan, and inspiration, but what I don't have is a lot of time.  I have to maintain 3000 words a day to make the goal for the month.  That's not a big word count, but that's a big daily word count, if that makes sense.  My writing schedule has been so disrupted I'm a bit worried that I may be out of practice of the daily writing thing.  

Which is one of the reasons why Nano is so awesome--daily writing habits are refreshed and reinforced.  If I didn't do this every year, I'm fairly certain I'd be a much lazier writer.  

Flashed by Writer's Block

Steve and C.S. brought fun show and tell books to the Washougal library combined writers and Nano prep meeting.  They included two of the really kewl Writer's Block books and a book on 45 character archetypes.  I ended up making tons of notes on my Nanowrimo novel project and wrote a flash.  That's one heckuva productive meeting right there!

It was a good time to get out of the house, otherwise I probably would have gotten zilch done in writing today.  Unfortunately I'd miscalculated the time of the OryCon 30 meeting and missed it. 

In other news, I've had a story accepted for publication.  I'll post details when I'm cleared to do that.  Also, my honorable mention certificate arrived from Writers of the Future.  It's gorgeous and hand-signed.  Definitely something I'm going to frame for the office or maybe the I Love Me Wall in the stairwell.

The Trinket Box
50,250 words
201 pages
29 days
The End!

Writing like a madwoman

I'm  playing catch up with Nano this year, same as last year.  There's something about OryCon and Nano together that's kicked my butt very consistently during November these past couple of years.  But I like it, kinda, sorta.  I'm at 38,789 words today, so far.  I'll need about 5606 words each day for the next two days to win.  I'm not going to be able to do much if any writing on Thursday, so that's all for me.  Of course anything I can skim off of that count tonight will be a big bonus.  5600 words in a day is doable, but it's a lot.  That number hits especially hard because today I did about 4000ish, at least I think that's what I've done so far, and I'm pooped.  Man, I hope I miscounted that.  Yuck.  I hope I did more like 6000, yeah, let's say I did 6000 and the next two days will be a cinch.

Go Nano!

Broken

I just broke the halfway point in Nano. I'd do the Snoopy dance to celebrate, but I'm feeling kind guh today, so I'll just grin slightly in pleasure and down some more ibuprofen.

I've decided that my goal before Orycon is 30,000. That would be where I need to be by end of day Sunday, so even if I don't get any writing done at Orycon, I won't be going into next week behind.

That means another 17 pages before I head off on Friday morning. I'm hoping to get in a few more pages tonight (five more would be good, seven more would be ideal), but I still have a chunk of other things (like, um, a critique) to do today. And then there's the Powell's sf/f authorfest tonight, though if I'm feeling like I am at the moment, I may have to stay home. I'd love to go, really, but I'm also trying to be realistic about what I can and can't accomplish.

Bleh. Screw reality! I'm a writer! I can write myself doing it all!!

Ignoring cramps of epic proportion, Carissa not only completed all her laundry, lugging the linens up the back stairs to fold and store away, but vacuumed the house and cleared the overflowing counters of their several days worth of dishes. She wrote a stellar critique for the writers workshop on both the synopsis and the excerpt of her fellow attendee, typing it up in a readable format and filling out a short form to organize her thoughts for presentation before printing off several excerpts to choose between for the ORCs. And then she drew up the packing list for gathering her items the night of packing, wrote up instructions for taking care of the animals for the neighbors, and still managed to finished writing seven more pages before getting dressed to head out for an authorfest across town. She fed her daughter and herself, cooking a nice turkey chili meal before depositing her daughter with the neighbors to play until her husband was home, took the dog out one last time, and then she was off to an evening of discussing books and writings and little book shopping. All the shape of [Carissa the writer checks clock] a mere three hours!

You know, I'm tired just writing about all that stuff to do. Thankfully, I still have another full day in which to get ready.

Happy about Hats

I'm so glad the whole hat thing came up at the Nano meeting last night. I'm having lots of fun with various hats, and my pov character who is so steadfastly against them. I think it's because in the Kilhells, where she's from, they only wear hats in winter. The rest of the time their hair is wild. Few bother with it, not even braiding, although men will sometimes braid their beards. I think it's a physical show of her own feelings of being an outsider, the ties of loyalty she still feels to her homeland and the regret and guilt she feels for not returning home.


[i] ©2000 Denise Van Patten - http://collectdolls.about.com
I love big, daring hats and it's fun to put my characters in them.[/i]

He hands me a brocade vest. Thankfully it has frogs, not laces and it goes on fast.
I look up and he has a big, lacy hat in his hands.
"A hat?" I move around him and make for the door.
"It completes the ensemble."
"Jasmine, you're not going to convince me to start dressing fashionably right before a fight."
"But look at it! I'd love to wear this hat, but it doesn't match my clothes. It's a beautiful hat, Billi. It'll look good on you."
"Let's just go." I'm ready to fight. I just pray that I'll fight on the right side.

8509 words

This year it's a little easier to be on a work schedule and to write, at least so far. I couldn't write at all the first two days but I've caught up, thank goodness. I'm finding a huge advantage to revisiting Mayhem--I've missed these characters and writing with them is like visiting with best friends. Maybe that will make my draft even crappier than usual, but at least it's fun.

I'm writing it in a style waaaay different than normal. Not only is it in first person present, which I normally dislike, but I'm writing very short chapters, 3-10 pages. Writing this far outside my comfort zone for a Nano would probably fail, but with super-comfortable characters it's coming along okay. It's a great learning experience, and it keeps me on my toes without dragging me far out to sea in a riptide. If it stops working I'll probably revert to my normal third person, but I won't go editing back from the beginning to make it consistent until I've given it a chance to rest a couple of months. Then I can read it and decide if I want to keep the first person present or if I want to go back to normal view.
Normal View! NORMAL VIEW!!

That was for the MST3K fans out there.

The story so far--old friends reunite in grim circumstances, the pov character almost dies, and demons attack the fortress. I wonder what the next 42 pages will look like.

Eleven days and counting until my new computer. Just in time. The Finder crashed this morning. Time to back up Gypsy again before imminent catastrophic failure.

Then again, much like the Cascades, you never know what's going to be a full-blown top-exploding eruption and what's going to be another fluffy hiccup.

Going, Going . . .

Not only did I get all nine (yes, nine!) pages typed in that I'd written last night, but I wrote another nine on top of that, bringing me to 31 pages (around 7750 words). And the story is going so well! I have plot. I have characters. I have situations both profound and tragic. And hopefully, I have enough to keep me going through the dreaded week two, which is only four more days away.

I hope I do. I really think I do. But it's still so early in the draft to tell. In the very least, I've given myself lots of room (about two thousand years worth) to maneuver. And extra pages, which I'll keep adding to so that when I hit the typically unavoidable wall of plot breakdown that occurs in week two, I'll have some leeway to puzzle my way through it without losing too much ground.

Wow. This is actually working out!

Write-In

I wasn't sure how well I'd hold up at the library write-in tonight, given that I'd be handwriting, but I did great! Twelve hand written pages to add to the four and a half typed pages I finished early in the day and I'm ahead of the daily goal! And the story, for as much as I have a story, is rolling along. I have no idea where it will end up, but I'm having a lot of fun finding out where it's going each day.

I'm looking forward to next week's write-in. Now if only I can get those hand-written pages typed up in a timely manner . . .

Bring It, Nano!

The regiment of daily medication is pushing me back into the realms of the Healthy; the in-laws have left us after five days of grandparent fun. Between illness and in-laws, I was fretting about being even the little prepared for Nanowrimo that I had planned, but that all changed, thanks to an ethusiast author signing and a little e-mail from Chris Baty.

The author signing was preceeded by a reading (of a short story) and a Q&A session. I came away enthused about the craft I'd chosen and ready for daily writing again. But moreso, I want to enjoy the writing. I get to dreading Rough Drafts to the point of paralysis. This nano I get the chance to Get Over It, Already, and just have fun writing.

Chris Baty's e-mail reminded me that writing is all about opening doors and seeing what's on the other side. And I want to open those doors! I want to see where they go!

So no outlines for me! No synopsis! No long, drawn out, pre-planned plot! I'm going into Nano this year with just a handful of colorful characters: a sufi dancer named Argent Rose; her wise-cracking bodyguard, Saia; Rinker, the tinket-box maker; the red-coated homeland guard and their Visigoth adversaries. There might possibly still be a convent of rebel nuns and a witch with a penchant for making golems. At this point, I'm leaving all the doors wide open.

I have no idea what the landscape will look like on the other side, but I am looking forward to the voyage there!