Celebrating the Milestones... and Moving Forward From There

So, I hope everyone out there had a productive week. I sure did. I feel like I might be back in the groove ::fingers crossed::. I beat my goal of 1500 words by almost double. And, I've finally crossed the big 200 page mark on the active story. It feels like I've been pulling teeth to get there this time, especially with the slow summer I've had. I had been starting to worry I'd never get there.

In addition to hitting that hurdle, I've started working on dossiers. And although I haven't done any editing work for either of my finished stories, I feel like I'm back in a fabulous place.

At the beginning of this week, I started thinking about getting ready for NANO.

Get ready for NANO! Isn't that still about a month and a half away? you ask.

No? You're asking what NANO is?

::rubs her hands together::

NANO -- short for NANOWRIMO, or National Novel Writing Month -- is one month of sheer madness. 150 pages or 50,000 words in 30 days, the whole month of November writers everywhere are called to action with the simple premise of literary abandon. It doesn't have to be good right away (that's what NANOEDMO is for a couple of months later). The idea is to get done as much as you can without holding back or going back and editing until you've pulled as many rabbits out of your hat as you can in a month. Jenny, Ginny, and I will all be discussing the finer points of it as it comes and keep you all updated as to our progress, but if you're interested in looking into it now, check it out at www.nanowrimo.org.

So, in preparation for NaNoWriMo, I've made a commitment to up my word counts by 500 words each week. My original plan was to hit 1500 this week, 2000 next week, and so on. However, in light of the successes of the last week, I'm going to go an extra mile. My plan is that if I go past my goal, my new goal for the coming week is set at 500 past wherever I ended with the week prior. So, if I do nothing else this week, my goal will be around 3100 for next week. Seems big, but I had thought 2000 would be beyond me this week and I blew it out of the water.

I'm also going to be doing research for my NANO story, the second novel in the trilogy I started writing during last year's NANO. In the coming weeks, I'll be working up dossiers on all of the characters I know will make an appearance in the second novel (mostly because they made appearances in the previous one). And hopefully, I'll be ready and able when it's time. For now, I'm not going to worry too very much about doing edits -- I'll do a little now, but I think I'll be able to put more focus into it after NANO.

Any of those of you out there with plans for (or are already planning for) NANO?

New Week, New Work

So this week I'm feeling a little better about my "Actively Writing" story. On Mike's advice, I wrote an out-of-sequence scene -- an exercise I haven't done in a while. The scene I created is completely out-of-sequence and when I was done, it made me smile. It was a great moment between two of my favorite characters in this story. And it seems to have lifted some of my block. I have finally (FINALLY!!) finished Chapter 8.

Another thing I'm using to get things going and reorganize both my active story and the stories I'm editing is a character dossier. It's based in part on the character sheets of my youth (Oh, yes, I am a gamer. I know what THAC0 is.) and in part on more official information gathering paperwork. I hadn't really thought about doing these until I was re-reading my murder mystery and saw the part I'd written about the forensic report. I haven't done these in years, but I remember it did help a lot to remind myself of small details I might forget as the story grows longer. And, now that I'm more savvy with computer programs, I can create a web of connections and see where all my relationships are. So I've created a sheet to work with, and now, all I should need to do is fill in the blanks! We'll see if it works with both my writing and editing processes to get things going in the right directions.

I'll tell you how it's going next week!

Check out my guest post!

Here I am being all school-marmie and chatting about hiring freelance writers.

http://catalystblogger.blogspot.com/2009/09/guest-post-want-to-work-with-me-here.html

Tomorrow I'll have a writing related blog post up here (gasp on a Saturday and all!). But for today-- here's some freelancing tips!

A Weekend Away....

I hope everyone out there had a great Labor Day weekend. I have to admit, Labor Day weekend always makes me a little sad and restless. It's not that I don't like fall -- actually my two favorite seasons are fall and spring and the riot of color and comfortable weather both bring. It's just that I always feel that I should have gotten more done over the summer.

Mind you, I don't really think of myself as an overachiever. It's just there's something about the "laid back" days of summer, and my memory of vacations that makes me think: I had all this time to do something and did I?

Realistically, I'm not sure how much I can do these days: I don't have "summer vacation" in the old, school time sense. No endless, sun-drenched days of nothing much to do. I work now. Monday through Friday. 9 to 5:30. For someone else, and that certainly controls what I'm doing during those hours, when I'm not at lunch. And my vacations, out of necessity, all surround some holiday or other.

July was pretty much a bust. I reached page 170 in my current "actively writing" story over my brief Independence Day Weekend vacation and then spent the whole rest of July trying to get back to page 170 after realizing that the chapter as written really didn't do anything to move the story forward and if I went back and did it over, it would leave me in a better place to move forward. Embarrassing, as we (Jenny, Ginny, and I) have been working on just moving forward while writing and saving editing for afterward. And that last scene is the one I'm still having trouble writing.

August has been better. While I am having trouble getting that last bit of the fight scene to work, I have 184 pages on the main story and, thanks to some great advice, I'm going to bounce ahead a little bit and write an interesting scene that came to me last week before vacation. And one that should work to bring two other characters back into the story from the fringes they've been at for a bit.

And I've started looking at the second level edits of my first finished novel. And I've gotten a new prologue and a few ideas for at least the new first chapter. So, that's pretty good.

I probably should also not forget that August also saw the start of the blog.

So, all and all, summer has not been bad. It hasn't been fabulous, but it's been good enough that my dearly-beloved's moratorium on the computer this past weekend didn't leave me all panicky about getting something -anything- done. And it's really helped. I did bring a notebook for paper ideas. The one night I did any work in it, I outlined that scene for my main story. I think it's going to be pretty good. I have a lot of hope for it. But, I had a nice, quiet weekend away and didn't feel the pressure to have a ton done to show for the time off from work. I got to enjoy time with family and the lovely Maine coastline.

Did you enjoy your weekend? Was it a break? Or were you able to get work done? Do any of you feel that strange sadness to see the summer gone or am I just being strange?

Passive-Aggressive Hell

My rhino of revision is really enjoying himself this week...

Ok, I should backtrack before I continue with that thought. I've sort of nicknamed my writing process. Though my actual drafting and revising process follows Jennifer's, I have affectionately given the writing and revising stages totem animals. My writing stage has a writing monkey. I think this is because when I write I like to have total abandon. I like to be able to throw all my (literary) shit (ideas) around and take chances-- because sometimes the shit will stick. My revision stage has a Revising Rhino. My rhino bounds across my novel, ruthless, getting the plot into order, fixing massive continuity gaps and in general intimidating all my bad writing while protecting the small nuggets that are worth salvaging. My rhino is fearless, but fierce-- I am slightly terrified of him.

This week I'm finishing up my first read through. My draft is very rough. I've got some really lovely scenes and a plot that crumbles in the beginning and then smashes together at the end. I'm thrilled to finally be getting to the end of what has been (for me) an intolerable step in my writing process. I hate re-reading what I've written, because that's when my passive-aggressive streak takes over. My writing doubts for this week: my main character is annoying, my plot is not as original as I thought it was, someone else has written a better book on this topic, omg--did I seriously spend eight months working on this? it's awful.

So, I've spent most of my time convincing myself all first drafts are awful and that the only way to go from here is up. I'm looking forward to this week's challenge-- re-plotting and re-writing scenes that don't work. I feel more proactive and hopefully this will keep my inner passive-aggressive streak at bay.

So, spill it, do any of your suffer a passive-aggressive streak as you revise? Are these doubts normal? Or should I seriously consider another profession?

Adventures in Editing II: Returning to the Scene of the Crime

As you may have guessed, I'm a bit of a corny writer. I love puns. But as I've completed my read-through portion of my second round of editing my first novel -- my murder mystery -- I'm beginning to wonder if it might be a crime against writing.

I'm trying to figure out how, when I read through this the first time and proofread and edited and finagled, I missed just how terrible the first five chapters are. Or is this something that every writer encounters about their first book?

When I sent it out for the first round of friend-reads, I felt it was pretty solid. Now, I know why only one person sent me back a response.

But now I know what I need to do -- or at least I think I know what I need to do -- starting all the way back at the prologue. I'm plotting it out and readjusting my time line. We'll see how that goes.