This is the last week before the EarlyBird version of How To Revise Your Novel goes live, and I’m putting together the Lesson 1 Demo. Will be galloping all week getting the last parts of everything I need to have in place done before next week’s course registration.
I’ve been working since 9:30 AM, and it’s now 1:39 AM the next day and I’m still working. No time for ANY fiction today.
How did your words go?
by
Tags:
644 words. Salorý wakes to serious nausea, no memories, and a man she doesn’t trust telling her she’s home now. I’m finally really able to get into the book with this piece and it segues nicely from my opening.
710 words and romance is in the air with terribly bad timing.
959 words.
The Princess wakes up and goes outside and promptly gets accosted by a filthy toddler. The Princess finds the mother of the child and they talk. The mother, seeing only a beaten-up girl, tries to see if the Princess has any money and when she finds out she doesn’t, she suggests they turn tricks together… some of the spacers like their women bruised. The Princess is sickened and horrified and starts to cry and feel sorry for herself but realizes that she needs to think of a course of action or something.
I meant to write more last night but I went to the Monday Night Football game and my team lost. 🙁 It doesn’t sound like much but this is the incident that really pushes the Princess on the way to fighting back and on the way to maturing into the woman she’s going to need to be.
I also realized that I didn’t have a clear image of the station they’re in. I hadn’t expected them to spend this much time here. So while flying down to Houston, I really thought about the setting and this scene reflects those thoughts.
Zero words today. ZERO. Although yesterday I cranked out 5,000. I am still hating myself for not making Nano.
Out of curiosity… what foods if any do you guys munch on while writing?
Aw now, come on, don’t hate yourself! That’s a bad habit that won’t get you anywhere 😉
I do not munch during writing: I’ve found that if I have the idea to go get something to eat it’s actually my brain looking for a quick distraction so it can fall back into idle mode and NOT do its job (which would be, putting words on the screen through my fingers). That’s because munching keeps my hands busy, easily distracting and interrupting whatever train of thought I’m following.
I often drink while writing, though: warm tea, fruit and herb infusions/decoctions, hot milk and cocoa in the winter; in the summer instead I drink a lot of iced tea, lemonade, fruit juice in general and mint-flavoured drinks I prepare myself (nothing fancy though: I just mix cold water and mint syrup :)).
Hey everyone! I’ve been lurking for a few weeks, reading about what everyone’s been doing. It’s finally inspired me to do some actual writing of my own. I’ve been writing since I was in like 5th grade (aka like 11 or so years ago), but I can probably count on one hand how many stories I’ve actually finished.
My goal is 250 words a day and yesterday I did 560! I recycled a scene I wrote a while ago and updated it to fit with my new plot. It’s already a lot better.
Basically, my MC Franki went on a blind date with a CPA who happened to be haunted by the ghost of a past girlfriend. Ignoring the ghost bit, it’s based a lot on a semi-blind date I went on once, right up to the point where Franki’s date get’s left in the dust because he’s so obnoxious, self-centered, and boring. So let’s just say, it was fun writing that one out. I basically took my thoughts on that experience and twisted them a little so that no one would ever know that it had once happened to me. Does anyone else ever do stuff like that?
After a bad breakup with a boyfriend I vented on paper and came up with an 80K story with him as the “hero” who actually isn’t. He was supposed to die in the final battle, leaving the scorned female MC with the last laugh – only I never wrote the ending. I met someone else… and married him. 🙂
It’s great to take life experience and twist it into a scene though, very self-satisfying. And makes it feel like it happened for a reason.
I think we all do that at various degrees 🙂
Our own life experience and emotions are one of the most precious things we have as writers. Though I have to say that I’ve only been able to do this successfully *without* meaning to: all the times that I’ve written from my own experiences as a way to make me feel better about myself, my writing ended up horribly corny and judgemental. I suppose that was because my emotions were very recent and my wounds still open, and in an attempt to feel better, I wrote to tell myself not the honest truth, but only what I wanted to hear. I’ve stopped doing that, and I’ve started to know myself much better, in a way that I think has made me grow both as a person and as a writer 🙂
What else can I say? DasteRoad here, Italian, 28 and female. Welcome on board!
1697 words, in spite of blinding, wordage obliterating headache. But there was stuff I needed to write, and so I got it down anyway, somehow.
Hopefully the writing can be fixed when I’m not in this kind of pain!
Hope you feel better soon!
2686 words for Monday. Should be able to crack 50k for Nano today. It’ll be nice to be able to drop back down to a more manageable word count since the pressure will be off. And because my brain is in creative over drive, I came up with an idea that will help with the ending of a novel I wrote last year, and that sets up another based in the same universe. Gotta love it when the Muse saps you with that stuff!
Today, the MC makes a trip into Madison to pick up signage for her new shop and realizes that she’s being followed. Then, later, after a memorial service for the original victim, she winds up being the last person to see her favorite murder suspect alive, after taking the girl, who apparently got blotto, home after the service.
Oops, sorry, that would be “zaps” not “saps”!
1200 words. finished chapter 25 and started ch 26. need to write like possessed tonight and tomorrow (get to take the day off tomorrow as my youngest son doesn’t have school) in order to finish the book by Thanksgiving, but i now see the writing on the wall and i’ll be done by the end of November at the very latest. kind of excited to finish and be able to move on from this.
ch 25 was the climax of the novel, with Tzal facing off against the necromancer. i’m not sure how good the scene is, but i like it and think it fits with what i was going for. Now it is just the group getting out of Del-Krazeen and some final wrap up.
330 on Monday, after ripping out the boring sucky words from Sunday and starting over.
Still with the cold; it’s a lingering, nasty bugger. I’m not trying to push or anything today. I think I’ll just revise the current scene as best I can and maybe end with the new kid getting a phone call he’d really rather not have gotten.
I went crazy yesterday. I was almost to my 50k mark on my nano and pushed through while one of my kids was at preschool to finish. And since it was early, I decided to push on. So I wrote 6k words yesterday. And of my my supposedly minor characters threw a wrench at me. I had planned on just kiilling off the crazy King in my book and putting the Princess on the throne, but it turns out she knows he’s crazy, and that he’s trying to kill her. And I don’t think she’ll react well to my plan… but it’s almost over regardless.
Which leads me to another problem. I have just put aside the money (finally) to take HTTS, and now the revision course is coming out. So I don’t know if I should take the revision course, or wait (a long time) for HTTS to open again… What to do, what to do? Do you have a recommendation Holly (since they are both your courses)?
Congrats on your Nano win! Talk about crazy word counts! Way to go!
550 – continuing his emo tour of the city, the nephew enters a small brawl at the gates bordering the desert. The gates are closed but the “merchants” want out. A quick check of their caravan turns up a young boy – who looks nothing like the perishable food the merchants claimed to carry.
200 words – Memoir
The start of the new project was harder than I thought. But, started.
Congrats on tackling on your new project! I know how hard it can be to let go off old roots. Best of luck with Memoir! 🙂
2K, just as I needed for my plot. I had been stalling a bit and bounced ideas off my husband. Surprisingly, his ideas that I initially rejected with “come on, they can’t do that” and “nah, it’s not important at this point” are actually the ideas that I’m using now.
I do that, too. Though I’m still holding out on hubby’s idea that my first book is a trilogy in disguise. 🙂 Not going to happen; I’d need to get much deeper into the politics. Which is, of course, what he wants. (Maybe in a decade, when I’m a much better writer.)
Around 370 words on Monday 23th, all after dinner: couldn’t manage to write during the day because of (a) Evil Day Job stealing my soul and killing my good mood, and (b) The Long and Perilous Quest to the dentist (took me around 1 hour and a half to arrive there using our crappy public transport services: maaaaaybe starting to drive a car again would be a good idea).
Good luck Holly, with getting everything ready. Remember to take some time to sleep. You will think clearer after a good rest. I know this from experience, by having a break from solving one computer programming problem or another. I usually find the solution when thinking about something else or after a good nights sleep.
Email if you need something tested or proof read or whatever.
1,238 words.
Her break from court over, Princess Laena and her sister, among others, journey back to the capital for the upcoming official Abdication. When bad weather strands them halfway, Laena becomes impatient and impossible to live with until her sister reminds her she’s not going to miss the occasion; her father can’t abdicate until she’s there to be annointed his successor, and the kingdom won’t fall if the ceremony is delayed a few days.
638 words
703 words tonight, and Smara has been sold. Dominoes are falling and the main event is coming up. 😀 Good luck Holly, and don’t forget to rest well, I know I often forget when I’m busy writing. 🙂
Leave a Reply