Two weeks of vacation. Followed by the official launch of How To Revise Your Novel, because in my infinite wisdom (NOT!), I decided months ago that the week after two full weeks of wild course-writing mixed with tons of holiday family stuff would be the perfect time to launch a new course. (Insanity doesn’t run in my family. I think I’m breaking new ground here.)
I close the doors on HTRYN Saturday 9th at noon EST, though, so NEXT week I’ll only be writing lessons, and I’ll be able to get back to TalysMana, which has been my casualty for these three weeks by virtue of being the work nobody is paying me to have done on schedule.
This is your WABWM thread until I get back next Monday. By then, maybe I’ll have had more than four hours of sleep on any given night, and you’ll have recovered from the holidays, and we can get back to writing fiction. 😀
In the meantime, you’re in my thoughts. And I’ll be back soon.
hello everyone!
1/10 and 1/11 Words: still working on the culture clinic for my novel. it can get kind of difficult because im dealing with two cultures with some similarities but with recent major differences. but i worked yesterday on writing plainly how they’re different and why as a sort of reminder/summary. otherwise, i will just get frustrated when i realize im getting them confused. the important thing to realize, i think, is that one of them is not the “good” culture/people and the other the “bad” culture/people. they each have things they have to work on. so that’s what im going to work on today. i think it’ll be better if i separate the work for these cultures instead of answering these questions in the same document.
happy writing!
Ouch!!!!! Sounds like you’re in a tough place at the mo? Good luck.
Dean H (UK)
Well, since Holly’s MIA…
1/10 – 812 words.
The Princess leads a group of slaves out of their pens and to the ship and gets caught in the open by some gun emplacements that her crew hadn’t identified. But the Imperial Corvette at the docks comes to life, now crewed by The Princess’ men and women, and takes those emplacements out.
This was poorly written and not really thought out. I wrote this as a smash and grab instead of as an infiltration. During revision, this section is going to expand quite a bit.
1/11 – 346 words.
A Traffic Control tech at a mining colony speaks to a beautiful communications officer on an unscheduled ship. Normally, unscheduled ships would get turned away but the Traffic Controller is hoping to meet her and tells her that her ship can dock there.
After writing through the last few scenes, I realized I didn’t like them. The Princess used a frontal assault on this place and she wouldn’t do that in a million years unless she was commanding overwhelming force. So, I’m going back and writing in some scenes to show her and her crew infiltrating the base instead.
I’d hoped for more words but I’m tired. I spent most of this evening working on revision.
Hi everyone. This is my first post here. I’m writing a historical fantasy novel. Today I wrote 2000 words. Weekends I can write like crazy, but during the week it kills me. It’s hard to have the energy when you’re working full time. But 250 words isn’t that bad so I’m going to give it a try.
Hi Mary, It’s really hard fitting it in around full time work and family I know exactly how you feel, I try to set aside a nightly time slot 8.0 till 9.0pm is for me, my music and my keyboard then i’m away with it, well my head is! Once 9.0pm comes it’s close down until i’m in bed and I start thinking about the story line again and again and again?
Anyway welcome.
Dean H (UK)
Welcome!
Welcome to the group!
It’s normally got a lot more stuff going on but Holly’s been swamped by some of her other projects recently.
Weekend:
Revise scenes 10-13 inclusive of D&DI, and did my structural assessment of another 7 scenes of OFL.
I got 5000 over the weekend, not prolific, but decent.
about 500 words today– mostly plotting/brainstorming although some moving forward. back to ‘tough’ and ‘yuck.’ cloud-walking a faint, distant memory… sigh, writing brings out the bipolar in me… (this new section is looking to be too much stage setting/scenery that bores me and I don’t want to write it. I want action and plot and character development. so I need to figure out how to slip in the “this is here” and “this is there” part… guess I need to get back into my MC’s head and figure out what she’s looking at and doing instead of worrying about everythingthe reader can’t see yet.)
823 for Friday 4080 for the week with 5926 over crimbo and now on 41k total nearly half way there.
Glad to hear no one got hurt with the skidding thing you’ve all been trying out! We’ve got the snow thing going on too about 12cm and it stops the coutry ‘The UK is closed for business’ my old grandad would say “The Germans couldn’t stop us in the war but a bit of snow” me personally think the worlds gone Health and Safety mad. But who am I to argue.
Have a good week everyone.
Dean H (UK)
Holidays are over no words yet.
With New Years and my birthday, along with the resumation of school, my writing took the fall, which makes me want to tear out my hair. But, on the upside, while watching a mind-numbingly boring movie on WWI in History class, I had the brain-baby for another novel. Think Through the Looking-Glass crossed with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
So now I’m juggling two novels, a few concepts, a novella and the final editing of a short story along with school and life. It’s terrifying, but I love it. And I’m still getting in decent word counts, even if it’s never on the same project. I’m going to try to set aside certain days to do certain stories, but I don’t know how well that will work.
hey cayleigh. im in school too and i know how hard it is to write consistently. i haven’t been able to do it till now, and im still on the prewrite. i really have to make myself sit down and do it but always come away happy with the results of holly’s clinics.
did you do nano this year? i didn’t, but i read the forums a lot and heard about people doing word wars and having writing buddies and stuff. we’re around the same age and i think it would be awesome motivation, don’t you think? let me know. 🙂
No, I didn’t do it, to be honest I still don’t even know what it is, even though people talk about it all the time and I really should look it up. But I’d love to try something like that, if you can sorta explain exactly what it is you mean. XD
I can always use more motivation. 🙂
national novel writing month just google it. write 50k in one month. 1667 words a day. never done it. would love to tho.
well we could challenge each other or something. set a time limit like say ten min or even an hour. whoever has the most words at the end wins. that’s a word war. and writing buddies just hold each other accountable for not writing when we’re supposed to. we’re not just holding ourselves accountable because we are really good at convincing ourselves it’s ok to watch tv etc instead.
we could do this via write or die.
Right now my cpu doesn’t support Write or Die, but I’m getting a new one soon that will. Until then we could set a time and then at the end e-mail each other with our word count.
Does an hour sound good? Maybe from five to six? If that doesn’t work I’m pretty flexible.
(Since this conversation is starting to take up more than it’s share of pixels, my e-mail is soccerchick010795@yahoo.com, let me know what works for you.)
I broke 60K. **squee and dancing around** About 1199 words today. Scrivener says about 158 paperback pages, 172 printed. It’s looking more and more like a kid’s book which means I’m about 3/4’s done on Bk 1.
This process is the most difficult, challenging thing ever and also I will be walking around in the best mood all day… like floating on clouds… I just love this process.
So, I did jinx myself… again. UGH. I never, ever, ever should have written “I am out of the troublesome section now”. I laugh at my naiveté. I had no real idea how many decisions went into a story before I tried to write one.
… ok, very nice. I wrote out both problems [here] and the solution appeared both times. I’ve tried to do that in my writing document but couldn’t get anywhere. Somehow the process of posting just seems to free up the solutions for me. (I’m not meaning to jinx myself again.. ugh… too funny. can’t seem to help myself.)
Friday’s words:
KavI: 625
D&DII: 782
OFL: 1058
RFW: 1234
hey everyone.
started school this week, and i didn’t exactly get a good start…my alarm didn’t go off this morning/maybe i didn’t hear it so i missed my first class. got out of my second class and headed home, anxious to get some rest. well, it snowed a bit in my hometown (my college is in another town, where it failed to snow). the roads seemed fine because the snow had melted from them. so i drove normally. i get on my road and im on the curve exactly as i realize it is covered in frozen snow. i lost complete control, slid twenty feet, knocked some short, thick, green pole across a yard, and hit their young tree.
it was scary, but i’m fine, thank God. but my truck needs some repairs on the front driver side, along with that tire.
thankfully, my writing has been good to me lately. i finished the create a language clinic for my novel, and i am super happy with what I got from it. holly. you are a genius. now i’m on the culture clinic and i am getting some amazing ideas for my plot. getting lots of words.
oh. and im knitting a pair of socks, which also makes me happy.
sorry if i rambled or bored you. take care everyone!
glad you’re okay! winter is tough… I sort of did a sideways slide down my driveway yesterday morning. luckily I wasn’t going very fast. 🙂
I always heard knitting was a good way to mull over story ideas. Maybe I should get the yarn out (it’s not like I care what it looks like [terrible], just if it would help me get some plotting done)…
Love the rambling….. Snow *sigh* I wish.
Gabby: thanks. everyone keeps telling me how i was lucky not to have hit a bigger tree and/or kept sliding and hitting other trees because the fender got stuck in the front tire and stopped the vehicle. and yeah…. i’m having lots of fun with this pair of socks. lol. it’s a good way to relax in general and produce gifts at the same time. 🙂
Red_dot: thanks. we never get snow either. usually just once a year. it causes lots of accidents and this year it was me. :-b
Winter advice: Turn the front of your car the way the back of your car is going, and bump the shift into neutral. Always presume nobody else can stop. 🙂 Glad you’re ok!
As of today, I am at 23,000 (in 28 days) words out of 100,000. So I have averaged about 800 words a day. I wish it was actually 800 words a day, but it’s more like 1600,0,2300,0,0,0….etc. I think I need to be more consistent. If only life was.
Thursday’s words:
KavI: 644
D&DII: 790
OFL: 1034 – my word tracker estimates I’m at 95% on this now – should be done around Weds!
RFW: 1289
…and more structural work on OFL – I’m just about half way through.
about 250 words today.
My decision to set aside some time from the revision each day for new words paid off with 1797 words on Monday, 542 for Tuesday, and 758 words on Wednesday. It’s just pre writing for now; I’ve scheduled lift off on the new novel for February 1 and I can’t wait, although I hope to have a plan with some chapters and scenes in place by then. A tentative ending would be nice too…
Waiting for lightning (HTTS Lesson 3) — muse has offered some interesting ideas, one of which I said no to and she politely told me why I should keep it. She was right. Keeping it. She also said I need to keep following HTTS steps to get to the actual book and that she would co-operate as long as I do that. Her request is justifed … I hope to show her I can do this and stick to it.
About 2500 words over the past couple weeks. Really glad to make progress again and out of the troublesome section (hopefully I’m not jinxing myself again). :))
I’m in LA on business this week and I’m working 10-12 hours a day and then going out to dinners and stuff like that. I knew my writing was going to suffer this week. I should be back at it on Saturday.
286 on SNSS that was good and sad and sweet.
I also came up with an alternative ending for WIP that will take some serious repllotting work but it might be what I need to get me motivated again.
Yay, congrats.
Ugh, I was trying to find this really inspiring blog post I read the other day… it was something about getting your brain in the habit of finishing everything (even the nano projects that are totally broken) because otherwise your mind starts getting really good at jumping projects and you wind up with 20 great beginnings, 5 so so middles and 0 endings… something like that.
Well anyway, I wish you the best of luck. (I can imagine solving the problems of two different worlds could be very tricky to tie up all the loose ends).
yeah that’s pretty much the exact problem I’ve been having for a few years now. I’ve got plenty of beginnings and middles but only 2 projects ever finished and that was a loooong time ago!
Funny that I never had that problem with work or school.
Thanks for the encouragement!
Yeah, now that I am trying to write an actual story, I am surprised daily how tough it is (mixed with all the fun and excitement of it). 🙂 I can’t wait til I have two finished WIP too.
(also, I am really curious about your buried alive character and how your MC is going to get back to rescue him…or not… as the case may be) 🙂
Lucky for him MC’s friend, who was hiding in the cruiser, woke up and was smart enough to notice the much-too-recent ground distrubance on the plot. The cemetary gravediggers weren’t too thrilled about their hole being used either, so they dug him out. 🙂
Good luck with your story!
i don’t even know how much i’ve gotten done. with the exception of tuesday, some every day, which is better than nothing. thanks!
Good luck getting sleep and recovering. What you are doing may be mad, but it is GREATLY appreciated. Thank you!
I finally got back to my writing with the new year, and wrote 533 words for the 6th. Laena has been talked into taking some time away from everyone who pesters her with minor details about her upcoming coronation that no one else can handle, and is spending a pleasant lunch pick-nicking with her sisters.
KavI: 638
D&DII: 776
OFL: 1011
RFW: 1263
…and some more structural OFL revision. Should have the first draft done next week sometime, when I can really get stuck into the revision.