Sunday Links: November 18, 2012 Edition

Sixty percent of the way through November and Thanksgiving is just days away. Since I just took a blogging hiatus in the past ten days for Philcon, I'm not going to take an extended hiatus for Thanksgiving. However, I will forgo a post on Thanksgiving itself. So, the only post between this one and next week's Sunday Links will be one on Monday.

While plenty of writers are deep into writing a first draft of a novel for NaNoWriMo, I'm tentatively re-exploring last year's NaNo project, both by re-reading it myself and getting feedback from a reader. This is both exciting ("Yay! It's no longer just sitting gathering electronic dust on my hard drive!") and a bit daunting ("Ugh! It's kind of a mess with little bits and pieces hanging off here and there which need either fully integrated or lopped off."). I think the only way it's going to turn into something truly readable is for me to re-outline it. Large chunks will end up getting completely rewritten, I'm sure. On the bright side, as I was reading it there were moments here and there where I thought to myself: "Hey, that works rather well!" So, even though it was written by someone newly back to writing who had never written a novel before, there's that, I suppose.

If you're doing NaNo this year, I hope that you're enjoying yourself. I'm glad I'm not doing it again this year, but I think I may plan on having a novel-length project ready to tackle during November 2013.

For now, here are this week's writing-related links as well as a link to my own blog post from this week:

Thoughts on NaNoWriMo 2012

We may be in the heat of summer right now, but in just a few months we'll be coming up fast on the first of November and the start of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I haven't figured out yet what I'll be doing writing-wise during that month. Last year I wrote the first draft of a YA time-travel fantasy "Adrift." I have yet to get back to doing a second draft of it.

I'd said earlier in the year that I didn't want to work on a new novel project without making an effort to see "Adrift" through to further drafts. On the one hand, I wonder if "Adrift" is even salvageable -- I'd only been back to writing several months when I wrote that draft and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it had major flaws. On the other hand, that feels like sort of a cop-out -- an excuse to leave something undone.

Dissecting the Short Story Update & "Lucky 7" Novel Excerpt

OK, so barring a last minute surge of votes for one of the other two stories, it looks like Ken Liu's "Memories of My Mother" will be April's Dissecting the Short Story entry. I'm planning to have that post up either 4/26 or 4/30. Thanks to those who participated in the voting. I'm hoping that having the story be readily available for others to read along will help generate some discussion.

The other piece of business today is following up on a blogfest tag, Fellow writer Rance Denton tagged me in the Lucky 7 blogfest. I'm not going to tag other writers, but will play along with the game otherwise. I'm supposed to "Go to page 7 or 77 of your current work-in-progress, go down to the 7th line, and post on your blog the next (approximately) seven lines!"

Current work-in-progress could be any one of a number of things. But the only one with a page 77 would be my NaNoWriMo project "Adrift." Since any excuse to bring that back towards the front of my mind momentarily is a good one, I'll go with this excerpt from page 77 of the first draft of "Adrift."

"Julia sat up. She was outside, in the same place that she had been two times before. But when was she? The only way to find out was to get up and head towards the road and the town she had found before.

She stood and began to walk, heading in the direction that she remembered going before. A compass would help, she realized. Add that to the list of things that she would need to hang onto as she went to sleep if she was going to do this again.

The thought momentarily struck her that it was amazing that she could simply accept this now. One moment she was in her home, in 2012. Another moment, she was somewhere else and probably somewhen else as well. And yet she completely accepted it. There was no doubt in her mind that this was reality, no matter how impossible it might seem."

Sunday Links: December 4th, 2011 Edition

As part of my writing goals for December, I finished up a new short story Saturday and got it out on submission. This was the first of my "Write 1/Sub 1" stories for the month. This one ended up developing sort of interestingly. I ended up just starting freewriting with a setting and some characters and saw where it took me. That's something I basically never do, but it seems to have worked well in this case. So the lesson here is that sometimes breaking out of your existing writing routines can work well.

I also got a little pleasant surprise in my email this afternoon, word that one of my story submissions already out has moved on to a second round of consideration. Not a sale yet, but a nice little bit of encouragement for a Sunday afternoon.

And now, on to the links...

The Power of "Can" - My Biggest NaNoWriMo Lesson

OK, so it's December but I'm still brain-deep in thinking about the NaNoWriMo which has just passed. Don't worry, I already have some thoughts about blog posts that are less focused on my NaNoWriMo experience soon -- honest!

I've thought of myself, admittedly off and on, as a writer for most of my life. But never as a novelist. I've written dozens and dozens of short stories. I had thought about doing NaNoWriMo years back but never committed to it -- heck, I never even really did anything more other than learn it existed.

Thinking honestly, I'm not sure that I'm going to pour tons of energies into novels in the near future besides the one I've already completed a first draft of. I think that, for me, one of the pieces of enjoyment I get out of writing is building up something new quickly and concisely in the form of a short story. Who knows, maybe I'll feel differently once I've gotten into the second and third drafts of "Adrift" next year. There was a certain exhilaration to charging headlong through 57,000+ words of new prose in November, I'll admit. I got into the world of those characters in a way that let me write very, very quickly at times and there were times when the story felt like it was moving along in interesting, unexpected new ways that gave a real high.

Still, the big thing I learned here -- the one overarching lesson for me from NaNoWriMo is that I can write a novel. If I have some inspiration strike me someday for what seems like a great novel, I will never ever have the excuse again of "Oh, I don't know how to write novels. I just know short stories and everyone knows they're two different forms." Yes, they are two different forms. But I've worked in both now and know that tackling a novel isn't something which I have to shy away from if I want to do it in the future.

That's an incredibly powerful thing, when I think about it and if I somehow end up with nothing else from this NaNoWriMo besides a trunked novel after going through revisions and critique and more revisions, I believe it will have made the experience completely worthwhile.

"Adrift" First Draft Complete

So here I am. Just a tiny bit under 28 days since NaNoWriMo started here in Ohio, and I've typed the last words on the first draft (very much a first draft!) of "Adrift," the working title for the project I chose for NaNo this year.

Honestly, I think I'm in a bit of a daze. Before a few months back, the longest thing I'd ever written was a roughly 9,500 word long mystery story (technically, I suppose, a novelette per "prize" definitions which tend to cut off "short story around 7,500 words). I started in late-summer/early-fall on a very half-baked novel idea which I honestly have no idea if I'll ever go back to.

But, you know, if I hadn't made that first attempt a couple of months back, I doubt I'd be sitting here typing these words now.

Sunday Links: November 20, 2011 Edition

I haven't talked about progress on my November goals explicitly yet this month, so I figured this was a good time to do so.

1) Write 50,000 words of new fiction. Well on my way. I'm over 40,000 total words for the month with 10 days remaining. If I somehow fail at this one, it would be a shock.
2) Complete ("win") NaNoWriMo. I noted when I set these goals that 1 and 2 were sort of counterparts with 1 being a bit of a "safety net" in case I something went truly awry with my NaNo project. I'm over 70% done with the official NaNo objective now. Again, it would take some monumental collapse for me to not reach this goal.
3) Keep my regular blogging schedule. On pace. If I choose to skip a post or two over the holiday weekend, I don't think I'll count that against myself, though I'll still note it in my month-end wrapup.
4) Write at least one short story of 1000 or more words. Done as of yesterday. I'd written several flash fictions earlier in the month, but nothing lengthier in the short fiction realm.

So, unless anything really bad happens in the next week and a half, I should meet all of these goals. I'm really very happy about this, since I wasn't sure I would be able to both write 51,000 or more words of fiction in a month and keep up blogging regularly.

One other thing I'd like to mention before I get to the links. The recently-completed Platform-Building Campaign run by Rachael Harrie included three challenges. Regular readers of this site will know that I wrote a flash fiction for each challenge and that the 2nd and 3rd both were awarded 8th place out of over 100 entries. One of the other campaigners, Katharina Gerlach, worked with many of the writers of responses to the three challenges and got permission to use their entries in a collection which is currently on sale with the proceeds going to charity. One caveat, I have not vetted the charity to which the funds are going. I trust that it's a good one, but if you want to validate that, by all means do so.

Four Things NaNoWriMo Has Taught Me (So Far)

Monday afternoon I passed the 25,000 word mark and then some on my NaNoWriMo project. So, I'm more than halfway to "winning" NaNoWriMo with 50,000 words for my work in progress. This is now by a fairly large margin the longest thing I've ever written. Before a couple of months ago, my longest ever work was a short story (more technically perhaps a novelette) of just under 10,000 words. I got about 18-20,000 words into a novel project in late-summer/early-fall before I stalled out on it for the time being.

Still, the longest completed work of mine remains that 10,000-ish word story. At this point, I'm estimating that the novel I'm working on, which I currently am calling "Adrift," will end up around 60,000 words. So by that measure I still have more than 50% of the work to go on the first draft. It's a daunting task, but I'm encouraged by the progress that I've made so far.

Thinking about the last two weeks' worth of writing, here are four things I've learned about my own creative process as a result of NaNoWriMo along with some comments on how other writers might look into the same aspects of their process.

1. I have a limit. For me, this is about 4,000 words in a writing session. Once I've gotten that much written, which probably means about 3-4 hours straight of composing (along with the occasional Twitter break and suchlike), I'm done. I feel tired, I feel unfocused, and I don't want to write another word. Even if I'm in the middle of a key scene, I have to take a break. I suspect that most writers have some similar limits, though I also know there are some who can write many more words in a session. The important lesson here for me is that trying something like "The 3 Day Novel" probably isn't even worth considering for me. I'd be miserable when I was done. The other key takeaway for me is that I can't let myself fall too far behind in NaNoWriMo this year or any other because I'd only be up to so much "catching up."
2. I work well when I have a plan. Yes, it's the famous "plotter" versus "pantser" discussion. I'm now firmly convinced that I'm a plotter. That doesn't mean that I don't end up going down paths I didn't originally expect in my writing. There have been several developments in my NaNo project that I either didn't expect or that presented themselves in an unplanned way (even if the development itself was planned). Granted, I've still got a lot further to go, but with my 2200 or so words of notes that I made in October (perfectly "legal" for NaNo) I feel much more confident about the path forward. The important thing for other writers here would be to be aware of what writing style works best for you. If you are sure you're a pantser, you probably aren't going to be happy plotting. If you're like me, and are sure you like plotting, don't go off willy-nilly into a long project and expect it to work out well.
3. Having a support group is important to me. In fairness, I had already sort of learned this before NaNoWriMo, but it's become even more obvious during these last two weeks. There are people on Twitter who I have done multiple word-sprints with throughout the month to-date. We've frequently sought each other out to see if we were available to urge each other on. I've had some very productive sessions during these word-sprints.
4. It's okay to not fill in all the blanks right away. I tend to write in a very linear fashion, starting at the beginning of the text and ending at the completion. Here, there have been several times it made sense for me to make a note about something I would want to research in more detail later and move on. These weren't things that had an impact on the plot where I would be likely to have a problem if my research led me to an unpleasant surprise, and it let me keep moving forward with the first draft. Would I advise doing this with a key plot point? No. But if it's a bit of period "texture" detail, I think it's just fine to make a note about what you want to research and move on.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year or have you done it in the past? What has it taught you?

NaNoWriMo Progress and Musings

Less than 48 hours ago I was sitting on 8,334 words. Now, after a good chunk of writing on Sunday, several hours at a write-in earlier today, and a #1k1hr session with some people on Twitter tonight I'm at 14,150. That's nicely ahead of "pace" for the first seven days of NaNoWriMo and gives me some buffer for the rest of the work week.

Will I make it to 11/30 with a completed first draft? Certainly, right now it's looking good, at least for hitting the 50,000 words required to "win." If I'll be actually to the final word of the story by then or not, I'm not sure yet, and probably won't be until I get a lot closer. I'm nearing the 25% point of my "outline", though, so guesstimating that 60,000 words is a likely final length doesn't seem unreasonable.

And, of course, then I'll be far from "done." I'll be thrilled with what I have accomplished, of course. I'll have planned and executed a project in a thirty-day time period and likely dealt with multiple unexpected events along the way (both real and fictitious!) which required adjustments in my plan. But the novel won't be ready for anyone else to read. I'm sure I'll need at least a second pass through before I want to let anyone see it, other than maybe some excerpts here and there.

I was having a Twitter conversation tonight where the topic of what the ratio of first draft time to editing time is likely to be for a NaNo novel. I haven't specifically tracked it, but I think that I spend about 2-4 times the amount of hours revising a piece of work as I spend in first draft. That includes all rounds including feedback from critique partners. So, realistically, it will probably be six months after 11/30 before I'd have a good sense of where my novel might be going next. And that's OK. It's a long race and there can be lots of winners. And even if what I ultimate decide is that this one's going in the trunk, I'll know that it's something which I am capable of doing, and I'm sure I'll have learned plenty in the experience.

Sunday Links: November 6, 2011 Edition

NaNoWriMo is underway! As of Midnight this morning (the 6th), the month was 1/6th over, which makes 8,334 words the "pace" for getting to 50,000 words by the end of 11/30. And that's exactly where I found myself when I hit the scene break where I planned to stop. Quite a fun coincidence! I'm looking forward to doing my writing today as I stopped right before one of the most pivotal scenes.

Earlier this week I was informed that I finished in (a familiar) 8th place in the third Platform-Building Writers' Campaign challenge. I was quite pleased to have placed in two of the three rounds! Thanks to Trisha from Word + Stuff for donating the prize which I won and to Rachael Harrie and all the others who volunteered to coordinate the challenge.  (Oh, and Trisha? I'm officially jealous of your NaNo word count. 23,482 already? Wow!)

Now to the links!

Sunday Links: October 30th, 2011 Edition

I've been mentioning NaNoWriMo during each of these Sunday Link posts in October, now the time is almost at hand. I still have a bit of work I'd like to get done as prep work, but I have a reasonably good feeling about where I stand. Hopefully a week from today I'll still be feeling optimistic. Anyone who wants to be a writing buddy on the site and hasn't found me there yet can add me as a buddy via my NaNo site profile.

In addition to the good news I got earlier this week about my story being accepted as one of the winners for the October Kazka Press Flash Fiction contest I also heard today that my story "My Name is Imago Montoya..." finished in 8th place in the second Platform-Building Writers' Campaign challenge. Woo-hoo! Thanks to Saba from Of Thoughts and Words, Margo Kelly, and Janice Seagraves from Janice's Home for donating the prizes which I won and to Rachael Harrie and all the others who volunteered to coordinate the challenge.

Now for this week's links!

Sunday Links: October 23, 2011 Edition

With just over a week remaining until NaNoWriMo kicks off, I finally got some decent planning time in yesterday. Nowhere near as much as I probably should have, but enough that I felt good about what I had accomplished. I've got the main very-high-level story arc nicely laid out and the main character's family tree about 40% complete. I want to get to the point where I have a reasonably-detailed outline done by the end of next Sunday. By the way, if you are looking for an online tool to make a family tree, Family Echo seems to work really well.

Normally I wait until the very bottom of these links posts to tout anything of my own, but I do want to draw attention to my new "Call & Response" Flash Fiction series. The basic idea here is that readers can propose prompts for me to write a flash fiction based on. The prompts can be anything at all: a picture, a song, a concept, whatever. I'll pick my favorite prompt, write a story based on it, publish it on the blog AND send a $5 Amazon gift card to the person who provided the chosen prompt. This seems like it could be a lot of fun for all of us.

And, yes, along with counting down the days to NaNoWriMo, I'm still counting down the days until I can replace phone with one of Sprint's new iPhones. Playing with the one my wife bought has definitely convinced me that this is a good choice for me.

Now for this week's links!

Sunday Links: October 16th, 2011 Edition

Hmmm... Didn't October just start? The post title claims that we're more than halfway through the month, but I'm finding that hard to believe. *double-checks calendar* Nope, that's right. Well, how about that. They do say that time flies.

Speaking of time... There are still a few days left to enter the first Kazka Press monthly flash fiction contest. One of the things mentioned in my poll was an interest in knowing about new contests and markets. Since I like flash fiction, this one definitely was of interest to me. The people running it were also very responsive when I asked for some details about rights, etc. while they were still in their "pre-announcement" mode last month. This is going to be a monthly contest, so keep an eye on their site if you like writing flash fiction.

Among everything else this week I've been doing tech support work for my wife who got to be one of the first Sprint customers with an iPhone. I must say it's a pretty slick device. I should be able to get a new phone once November rolls around, and I'll likely get one for myself. So it's not really "tech support" it's just "reading ahead" for my own iPhone usage.  :)

But enough about my technophilia. It's just a bit over two weeks until NaNoWriMo time (and I'm not, I repeat, not panicking despite being a bit behind where I'd like to be with planning). One thing I am pleased about is having coming up with my one-sentence description for my planned novel: "A young woman who has just lost her parents to a car accident would give anything to be able to change that aspect of her past, but finds herself in a position where she must protect a different element of the past to save what remains of her family."

Now for this week's links!

Sunday Links: October 9, 2011 Edition

We're now down to just over three weeks until NaNoWriMo starts. The NaNo site is supposed to be re-launching with an updated version tomorrow (October 10th). So once that is live, it should be worth popping over to check out the changes if you're participating this year.

I'd be interested to know what sort of prep work any of my readers who are planning to do NaNo are doing. I know that some people do absolutely no prep at all and other people have detailed outlines, character descriptions, etc. in advance. 

Now for this week's links!

Sunday Links: September 25, 2011 Edition

Summer has officially given way to Fall. The next time I put up one of these weekly link roundups it will be October! Among other things, this means that NaNoWriMo is just a little bit over a month away. I'm planning to participate this year. Any readers who are also participating this year and would like to be "Writing Buddies" on the NaNo site, let me know in the comments below.

This week in the blog world has been busy, especially with the extremely challenging 2nd challenge in Rachael Harrie's Platform-Building Writers' Campaign. If you read mine ("My Name is Imago Montoya...") and enjoyed it, I'd truly appreciate you voting for it by clicking here and "liking" entry #42. That's also where you'd go to see the complete list of entries -- there are some great ones out there, so it's worth a browse.

With that little bit of BSP out of the way, I hope you'll follow me past the jump to this week's links!

Sunday Links

I hope everyone is having a good Sunday!  Here are a few writing-related articles which I've read in the last few days which I found interesting.


Changing Scale: Looking at Your Story from Different Angles by Janice Hardy (The Other Side of the Story) - Janice takes here architectural background here and relates it to writing. She talks about how changing your perspective -- going from looking at the "big picture" of your story to some details or vice-versa -- can help provide new ideas for your writing.


Forty-Five More Flaws That Expose Your Lack of Writing Experience, Part 3 (Plot to Punctuation) - A list with detailed examples of nine "gotchas" that novice (and -- as the author notes in the case of George Lucas -- experienced) authors can trip themselves up on.  Part three of five.

Why a Messy First Draft is a Good Thing by Julie Musil - I can see myself coming back to this one several times during NaNoWriMo.  "A messy first draft means you've finished a book."  Good words to remember!

What Self-Publishers Can Learn from Restaurant Impossible by Joel Friedlander (The Book Designer) - Since I've been thinking a lot recently about how publishing has changed and is changing, this article was interesting for me to read, and I liked his use of a TV show to draw parallels between writing and another business.