So I've just signed up to participate in the 100 Things blogging challenge, but I'm doing it a little bit slant. I'm using it to help launch my new topical blog, Single White Christian.

I've been, quite frankly, bitching and moaning for years about how the church underserves singles and makes us feel like second-class citizens. While I don't, at this time, feel qualified to start a singles ministry at the church I attend, I wish that one existed. I also have spent a lot of time griping about how the church doesn't seem to love people who aren't like them. I have friends who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, pagan, Jewish, atheist, and agnostic. I love these friends. I'm pretty sure Jesus loves these friends. And I hate that at many churches in America, they wouldn't be welcome. (I'm happy to say that at my church, they would.)

So I'm blogging, and I invite and welcome questions and proposals for guest posts. Let me know if you're interested. And I would LOVE to get some comments over at the blog itself, so please click the link and do some reading! :D

Okay, time to guilt myself into writing more. I meant to write a bunch last night. Instead I got sucked into the first three chapters of Love Is an Orientation by Andrew Marin. Good writing, and an amazing and excellent mission. I'm having to fight to keep myself from picking it back up to read some more tonight.

But no! No reading! Tonight I need to make a second attempt at the scene that is currently giving me trouble. It never fails to astonish me how easily some scenes pour out of the pen, while others are just a long, painful struggle for each word.

So tonight I have to get inside the head of my main villain and figure out what he wants to say to his major adversary. Who is currently within his power, and basically buying time with whatever (bruises, blood, nasty invective, etc.) he can afford to spend. It's not hard to understand what the poor good guy is feeling and thinking. The bad guy, though...

What motivates him in this scene? Besides the pure enjoyment of inflicting pain on someone he's hated for a decade? I'm just not sure yet.

So time to turn off the computer (and, more importantly, the internet), and put pen to paper and learn.

Chapter Three has refused to be written at the computer.

I do a heck of a lot of composition while sitting at the keyboard. I used to write longhand a lot more than I do now, but apparently Chapter Three needed to be written longhand. I cleaned out my fountain pens, discovered I'd lost my favorite one, spent three days looking for it while writing with other pens, finally found it, and wrote my way out of the first Moleskine notebook I had dedicated to this project.

Yesterday I made a VERY exciting discovery in a small town not to far from my house. Avalon Jewelry and Pens is an amazing shop with incredibly friendly and helpful owners. They're also the people who make Private Reserve Ink. So I made a visit yesterday and came home with a Chinese-made Hero 616 (something I've seen called a "workhorse" of a fountain pen) and a bottle of Black Cherry Private Reserve Ink.

Today I'm frantically typing Chapter Three in an attempt to get it to my betas before leaving on a three-day trip to Chattanooga for a quick Civil War history fix.

I'm incredibly pleased with how the pivotal scene in Chapter Three has turned out. And while it's fun to sit and type so quickly you transpose letters, there's a much more visceral thrill in trying to write fast enough to keep up with your characters when they seize the action and run with it.

I'm almost 20,000 words into my epic fantasy novel revision, and I'm finally beating my head against a subject I have long dreaded.

Calendars.

Seems like an innocent enough idea, until you think about how in epic fantasy novels, the world is usually not our own. Okay, Middle-Earth was our world, in a sense. But in the quest for an authentic-sounding world, will it really be shaped like Earth? Will it have the same diameter and orbit and axis tilt as Earth? Will it have the same length of year and day? Even if the inhabitants of the world don't know anything about planets revolving and orbiting suns and what actually causes the seasons, an author has to know that stuff, in order for it to have any internal coherence.

So from the beginning of my fantasy world's existence in my mind, I've always held to an Earth-like calendar, with 12 months in a 365-day year. The month names are the same. It drives me crazy to have to learn an entirely new system in order to read a fantasy novel, and trying to figure out that Istvaharla is actually basically our January, and Furryday is the same as our Friday.

But isn't it just as frustrating to be immersed in this world where the names don't sound like ours, and there are magical creatures we don't have, but still call the months names that go back to Latin-based languages and days that go back to pagan gods?

So I started playing with the notion of a 400-day year, with 96-day seasons and 4-day holidays between each season. The 96-day seasons would divide neatly into 3 months of 32 days each that way, which means easy math and calendaring for me, but a slightly different feel for the reader. Then I renamed the months, using a standard -ien/-en ending to the name, to indicate months. But that would mean I needed to rename the days, as well. It might not matter, since I can't recall a single time I mention the name of the day, but that probably just means I have a dozen mentions in the novel that I don't remember.

By this time, I've only written 647 words today, and I'm tearing my hair out, especially since the only reason I need to do this right now is because I want to know how much time has passed since the start of the novel. I don't want to have people in chapter 2 scene 4 reacting to something that isn't actually going to happen for four more days.

So right now I'm giving up on the calendaring system and numbering things by what day of the book they happen on. Scene 1 happens on DAY 1. Scene 2 happens on DAY 6. Etc.

But I'm curious. When you read a fantasy novel, how much attention do you pay to the calendar? Do you have strong feelings either way about the date system an author uses? Why?

I should have realized that renaming one of the major villains in my epic fantasy novel was going to be a lot of work.

I'm one of those people who's always set great store by names. I love to know the meaning of names. I throw in little jokes about the meanings. I play with spelling. In one novel, the characters even talk about the importance of names. (To be fair, it's in the context of why you never give your name to a fairy, so it's important to the plot of the novel. But still.) Back in my creative writing program at university, one of the compliments I consistently got was about my character names.

So I should have known, going in, that renaming this guy was going to be a bitch.

The villain's name was Robert. It's a good name, but it doesn't scream EVIL GREEDY BASTARD at me. Maybe because I have a friend named Robert...oh, and, duh--my grandfather was named Robert. What on earth possessed me to name a bad guy after my grandfather? My dad tells me he wouldn't mind, but it bothered me, and the name didn't feel right anymore.

I spent two days intensely scouring baby name books and the Character Naming Sourcebook by Sherrilyn Kenyon. What sort of name did I want? Robert means "bright", so I'd never really thought about the meaning of my villain's name. So what sort of names would I find if I went looking at meanings?

Oddly enough, there aren't indexes of names that mean "betrayer" or "oppressor" or "ambitious". The indexes all list nice characteristics, like "brave" and "pretty" and "strong". I suppose no one wants to name their kid something that might make them turn out to be the next serial killer. (Though all those people naming their babies Jacob? "Supplanter," y'all. Think about that. If Stephenie Meyer had been paying attention, Jacob would have stolen the girl at the end.)

But paging through on my own, I found a name that means "to oppress", one that means "loves war", and one that means "glory". Not that glory is necessarily a bad thing, but it's definitely something my villain is after. I also found a "friend of wealth", but that wasn't quite as fitting.

So I started looking at things his father might have named him. The villian's family symbol is a falcon, so I looked at names meaning "falcon". Turned out I really like one of those names, but I want to save it for one of the villain's ancestors. The villain's family is supposed to be a gatekeeper of sorts, defending the kingdom from a powerful enemy to the north. So I found names that mean "determined protector" and "nation's defender" and, yes, "brave". I really liked two of those names, and I liked the irony of naming the kingdom's betrayer something like that. The villain's family is also traditionally redheads, so I even found a name I kind of liked that meant "redhaired".

Of course, then I had to start trying out all these names. I went back and forth on three of the names in particular, but none of them quite worked. Ellard made me think of Ellery Queen every time I said it, so that was just out. (Nothing against Ellery Queen, but this isn't a mystery novel.) Ledyard is a cool name, but it sort of feels like one of those bizarro mashup relationship names, like if Logan Eckles and Edward Cullen got together. (And now that I mentioned that, I totally ship Ledyard.)

So what did I finally do? I looked down my list of names, threw out the meaning of them, played around with the spellings, and eventually picked the one closest to what I'd already had.

So Robert Perregal has officially become Rostis Perregal. Rostis, shortened from the Slavic Rostislav, meaning "glory".

Writer's Digest is giving away a ticket to the San Francisco Writers Conference. I'm entering to win, because this is the year of the dragon, which means it's my year. :D I confess, I would be utterly unprepared to go, and I would have about a week to get ready, but hey, I'm spontaneous and love to travel, and I've never been to SF.

The contest ends Feb 10 and to enter you just have to comment to this post and spread the word via social media (except Facebook).

Of course, so far 2012 has been a bust, writing-wise. I need to get my behind in gear. I've got my NIndy group's short story week challenge coming up later in the month, but I've been spending a lot of time coasting, since pretty much all of January was taken up preparing for the trip to Trinidad & Tobago or traveling to, in, and from T&T. I've been severely lacking in discipline, and I need to fix that.

So here's hoping I win a ticket to the SFWC. With my tax return this year, I could swing the flight out and back, even if I wanted to use that money to pay a bunch of stuff off. Hey, writing is worth a sacrifice, right? :D

What I am supposed to be doing: working on my epic fantasy novel.

What I am doing: working on the Lovefool achievement in Warcraft, reading TaleSpin fansites, compulsively checking my friends lists, and freezing my ass off.

To be completely fair to myself, I have made a lot of progress in brainstorming changes to the epic fantasy over the past three days. And my writing style does involve a lot of what my mother the cook calls "integrating time". But this is starting to get ridiculous.

...but I really do want that Lovefool achievement. I'm only three holidays away from the Long Strange Trip and master riding.


*headdesk*

Angry Robot publishers has announced an Open Door reading period between April 16-30 this year. It's for unagented debut novelists, and they are only accepting YA or classic fantasy.

My classic fantasy, which is still, arguably, my favorite novel, is languishing in overhaul purgatory. I believe with all my heart in the story, but I feel it's gotten a bit muddled. Can I do an overhaul in a bit less than three months? And if so, do I want to?

They're not accepting urban fantasy, and it's my urban fantasy novel that I was revising last year before NaNoWriMo took over my life, followed quickly by the holidays and my trip with Mom to Trinidad and Tobago. But as much as I love my urban fantasy novel, I love my epic fantasy novel better. I've lived with it in my head much longer. I know these characters.

The open door reading period would give me a hard and fast deadline, which is a very good thing for me. Self-imposed deadlines don't work as well as externally imposed ones. One of the reasons NaNoWriMo has been a winning strategy for my writing life.

Argh. I just don't know what to do!

I just signed up with a goal of 200,000 words in 2012. My projects will be to complete the rewrite of my urban fantasy novel, to complete the first draft of this year's epic fantasy novel, and to write a couple of short stories. I'm also factoring in 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo 2012 into the total.

WOOHOO!!!!!



I broke the halfway point today and had just over 6,000 words! Heading to bed early (haha, yes, 1:30 am is early these days) as a reward, and tomorrow I get to play Dragon Age or Warcraft for a couple of hours. I'm on a roll now, baby!


Also, I have realized that this is going to be a really bloody long novel. I'm pretty sure this one is going to end up right around the 100K mark when all is said and done. But that's okay, right? Epic fantasy is epic. :D

Finally, this novel (or this novelist) is picking up steam! Woohoo! :)

Lemme tell you, this has been a really crappy NaNo so far. Not for any reason except this: my discipline is broken.

I have a plot I love, characters I love, and a setting I absolutely and completely love.

I just have no butt-in-chair-ness.

But today, I said I was going to hit 10K or die trying, and fortunately, I'm still breathing (just barely, and only thanks to Benadryl, but I am). And my word count so far is



Huzzah!

Some of my favorite writing links, just in time for NaNoWriMo:

• Outline Your Novel in 30 Minutes - This has a lot of useful questions to get to know your characters. I've used this several times.
  
• Sketch a Novel in an Hour - Very similar to the first, which it's based on.
  
• The Snowflake Method - I haven't used this before, but it looks good for visual people.
  
• Novel in 30 Days worksheets - Lots of worksheets to develop character, scene, plot, and more. Based on Victoria Lynn Schmidt's Book in a Month. I haven't used these extensively, but they look useful.
  
• First Draft in 30 Days - From the book by Karen S. Wiesner. I don't follow this method 100%, but I love this book, and I love the worksheets. This year I've worked with it extensively during October to plot my novel, and I feel like I have a better handle on my idea going into November than I ever have. She has a few of the worksheets available online, but I bought a copy of the book and typed the worksheets into Word to make them easier for me to work with. I will say that I've been using this method for the past three years, and this is the first year I've fully embraced it.
  
• How to Prep for NaNoWriMo - Advice from Jennifer Blanchard, who runs one of my favorite blogs Procrastinating Writers.
  
• Procrastinating Writers' 5 NaNoWriMo Posts You Don't Want to Miss - Links to 5 useful articles about NaNo. One of them is the article I linked above.

And a very useful (and fun) tool I acquired several years ago and use every year: NaNoWriMo Report Card - this is the download link for an incredible spreadsheet. Originally Created by Eric Benson - Edited for 2004 by Rebecca Waterhouse. I just keep updating the year, and if I want a word count other than 50000 as my goal, I do a CTRL+H to replace 50000 with whatever word count I want (I'm aiming for 80000 this year).

What I've managed to do this weekend is depressing. Yes, so I put a new battery in my car (and in the process realized I had no antifreeze in there--yikes!). And I spent some time with my aunts. Did some organizing that desperately needed to be done. Finished reading another book. Converted another tape of music to digital files. Reached level 70 with my main alt in Warcraft. Played with the kitties.

What I didn't do: write.

I opened my revision file. I looked at the revision. I looked again at the manuscript I've been thinking about self-e-pubbing just for fun. I flipped through a notebook of ideas and thought some more about my options for NaNoWriMo (What? I like to plan early!) And yet I managed to do nothing.

I've told myself that I'm not going to bed without revising another scene. I have an hour and a half before I have to start the Sunday night bedtime routine, so it's possible.

So here's the plan: go scrounge up some supper, pour a glass of Oliver's Traminette, and REVISE.

To give myself some motivation to keep working on the revision, I'm posting an excerpt of the novel I'm currently revising (again) to try to get it ready to query agents. Any and all critiques are welcome. This is the first eight pages of my novel Maze of Moments, a modern faerie story.

***



Forget writer's block, artist's block was the real bitch. Zeva Couran shut the door of her house and studio, locked the deadbolt with her key, and took a deep breath. She'd spent the past hour and a half staring at the clay and feeling like she was suffocating. Maybe a walk would get the creative juices flowing...or release some frustration. The sun set late during June in Illinois, and the neighborhood she lived in was down at the heels, but not truly dangerous.

The Rottweiler at the yellow house down the street barked. A crow answered from the maple tree in front of her house. Zeva pocketed her keys and walked west on the sidewalk. After a block her stride lengthened as her muscles stretched. The air was sultry but comfortable, and she could see stars beginning to struggle out past the street lights.

Four blocks and two sets of train tracks later, there were fewer street lights, and half of those were burnt out or flickering on and off in drunken rhythms. No one stood around on front porches. No cars drove past. As she tried to pick up her speed, her boots clumped louder on the cracked pavement. Her arms, bared by her tank top, prickled as if something had brushed against her. Refusing to glance over her shoulder, she rubbed her arms and tried not to think about why she didn't want to look.

( Read more... )

I've been making a lot of those lately. "It's a three-day weekend, I don't want to work on the revision." "I have a migraine. I don't want to work on the revision." "I worked on plotting and world-building for a different project, I don't want to work on the revision too." "I spent all day doing housework, I don't have enough energy for a revision day."

Seems like I've been making a lot in my personal life too. "I'm sorry I suck so much at keeping in touch." "I just haven't felt like being online."

The truth is, I don't feel like I have enough energy for everything life throws at me as well as everything I want out of life. Since it's impossible to ignore the need to work & pay bills, impossible to ignore a migraine that feels like a spike through your left eye, and impossible to ignore kittens who are running roughshod over your head? I end up letting personal stuff fall to the wayside. I don't answer emails quickly enough. I forget to call my best friend. I stay up too late one night and drag around at half-energy the next.

I've been simplifying and cutting some things out of my life lately. I intentionally let go of a friendship that meant a lot to me, but simply became too emotionally vampiric for me to continue. Even the friends I do value have gotten short shrift lately, and I'm sorry about that.

Of course, I also have had some victories. I think I've done pretty well at raising two kittens at once, which wouldn't have seemed like such a victory this time last year, but definitely is. I've gotten a third of the way through my novel revision, despite the new migraines that started in June. I've read over fifty books this year.

We're slipping into autumn, which is always a reflective season for me. Something about the combines throwing up clouds of chaff in a bean field, the golden light, the breezy cooling of the weather, makes me take stock of my life and yearn to give in to my wanderlust. Knowing my birthday is a month away makes me wonder where I'll be and what I'll be doing on my birthday next year.

Just a little bit of lunch-time introspection...

Ganked from a lot of my friends, here's the NPR's Most Popular Sci-Fi & Fantasy novels meme. I voted, and of course am outraged that some of my favorites didn't place very high (or even make the list. WTF where is Paks?!) but I'm pleased that I've read a bunch of these, and today I started the highest ranked book that I hadn't read yet and have always meant to.

I'm cheating. I'm going to bold things I've either read all the way or read all I plan to. I'm going to italicize those I plan to read. I'm going to strike through the occasional Never in my life shall I read this book.

Also, I would like to say that I already did this meme once, because I printed off the list as soon as it was released on the website, and marked all the books I'd read.

( Read more... )

Wow, I thought I was at 36. Forgot about Xanth. A lot of these books have been on my to-read-someday list anyway (like Dune), but so many good new books come out every year I hadn't gotten around to a lot of them. I also read much more heavily on the fantasy side than on the science fiction side, and I'm incredibly disappointed that the Coldfire Trilogy by CS Friedman and the Company Wars books by CJ Cherryh didn't make this list. I know Coldfire is science fantasy more than science fiction, but still. *grumps*

And lately some of the casualties have been a couple of scenes I always liked and a character who, honestly, sort of annoys me.  But fortunately I've discovered a few foxholes, like a couple of scenes with a new character I like more than I expected, or a way to rearrange the plot in a way that both speeds up the lagging pace of the novel and also salvages what I liked best about my favorite deleted scene.

Another casualty of the revision process lately has been my confidence.  I've been saying for years that I think this is my most readily marketable novel.  This is the first one I plotted out in advance, and it has series potential but stands alone, and it does a lot of things I want the novel to do.  AND I'm suddenly not sure that I'm doing it justice yet.

I've been vicious with this revision.  I've looked at every scene and asked what it actually accomplishes, what purpose it serves, if it puts me to sleep rereading it.  A lot of scenes have simply been slashed out of existence because of that last reason.  And now I'm wondering:  If, after 7 years of living with this novel and thinking about this novel, I have deleted about a third of it, what's to say that after another 7 years of living with it, I wouldn't realize another third of it needed to go?

This morning while I was doing some mundane stuff at my paying job, I got to thinking about the main conflict in my novel and started wondering if it's really as compelling as I think.  What if the "bad guys" are right?  Will readers look at the situation and go, "You know, they have a point.  Why IS it that way?  Who actually benefits from this situation, and why shouldn't they try to change it?"  Because that's absolutely NOT the reaction I want.  But maybe I'm setting myself up for that.

It isn't enough to tell a good story.  I want the story to make sense.  I want the conflict to tug at readers' guts and make them root for the good guys.  And suddenly I wonder if I'm doing that.

Cannot wait for m_stiefvater's next book, Forever, to hit shelves! Check out this gorgeous stop-animation book trailer. And she wrote that hauntingly beautiful music for it too!



You can pre-order the book here at Fountain Bookstore. I'll be doing that myself very shortly. :)

Yikes.

I'm a reader of Procrastinating Writers blog and Write It Sideways blog. For the month of January, both bloggers are producing a "Better Writing Habits" newsletter, and I'm subscribed to that. So I'm going to try to post my responses here each day. We'll see how that goes! ;)

What are your worst writing habits of 2010?
Today’s Challenge: Identify your worst writing habit to be overcome, and devise a game plan stating exactly what you will do to break that habit in 2011.


My worst writing habit to be overcome is easily my habit of procrastinating. So my game plan:

• Stop choosing Warcraft or Criminal Minds fanfiction over writing original things. Not that either things are bad, and I want to continue participating in the CM fandom as well as leveling my Dwarven Hunter and a couple of favorite alts on Warcraft. But I need to do those things after I've done my writing for the day.
  
• Write 200 words each day. Rain or shine, sick or healthy, busy or lazy, it doesn't matter. 200 words is a minimum.
  
• Stop reading so many blogs about writing and just write. I need to choose quality over quantity when it comes to the writing blogs I follow (and really, any of the blogs I follow). I need to keep current on what's going on in the writing industry, but too often I feel like a writer because I read the blogs, when I really should feel like a writer when I write.

So I generally eschew New Year's Resolutions (and I've recently become a fan of slightlyjillian's method of taking stock and making resolutions on your birthday). But I also think there's a lot of value in having a writing plan for the year, and October (when my birthday is) seems like a weird time to create that. So here I am on January 1 thinking about my writing plan for the coming year.

My job is going away in just over a year. The Fortune 100 company where I work is going through a business reorganization that is going to eliminate about 90% of the jobs in my department (Finance) here in Indianapolis. The work will still be done, but it's going to be done at a shared business services center in Texas near our corporate headquarters. At the moment I'm not planning to move with my job (though that might be an option). Fortunately, the company gave us a lot of warning about this; we've known for about a year already that our jobs were going. So I've had time to think about what I want to do.

What I'd like to do is start making money off my writing so that when I start looking for a new job, I can look at 30-hours-a-week or less. I have a novel-length manuscript close to being submission-worthy, so my first goal for 2011 is to finish polishing that sucker and get it out there. I'm giving myself at least until August to concentrate on my writing and not worry about finding a new job.

( 2011 in detail behind the cut )

Overall goals are to sell 4 short stories this year and find an agent for my novels.

astraea36 and I have a bargain going that for every hour she spends at the gym each week, I'll spend that amount of time writing the following week. She wants to get in shape and I want to get some writing done, plus she's my alpha-reader, so we both benefit. Aside from her nagging, which I hope will happen often, you're all invited to poke at me and help keep me accountable.

I validated last night, in the middle of the scene that is about to ramp our characters up into the climax of the novel. Chloe and Braxton aren't talking to each other. As soon as Martin finds out about that, he won't be talking to Chloe either. Fortunately Jason and Carrie are both down with our girl Chloe, even if Carrie thinks she's a little melodramatic. Oh, and then there's the fact that only one of those people really knows Chloe is seeing ghosts.

Into that situation, I'm going to propell them against the bad guy, who is being bad for good reasons (or at least sympathetic reasons), but will quite happily kiill Chloe and anyone she brings with her.

I think it'll net me another 15-25k words for a truly complete novel.

Then I'll be ready for beta readers.

Beta Readers who love me.
Beta readers who are harsh.
Beta readers who want to bleed ink on my pages.

...yes, that's all possible. :D


Anyway, if you're interested/willing to offer a critique of my zero-first draft when it's done, comment and we'll talk. :)

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YAAAAAAY! I just officially caught up to where I'm supposed to be and even passed it!

It's a good thing, because I had completely forgotten I made plans for November 30. Of course, there's still a good chance I'll skip those plans so I can finish the novel. I'm getting close to the end, but I think (I hope) I'm going to get about 70k out of this story, once I get the plots and everything wrapped up.

Braxton threw me for a loop today with something he did, or allowed to happen, but that's okay. It gave Chloe a good reason for tequilas with the girls, and sets the stage for something that's coming up next. Or at least that was always going to happen, but today's events gives them that much more suspense.

Really don't want to go to bed. I could seriously keep writing for hours longer at this point, I've got so much momentum. But unfortunately I'm out of paid time off at work, so no calling in sick tomorrow for me. *sigh* Next year I need to make sure I have at least one day in reserve for last-minute writing on NaNo. LOL

Still writing...

Aka "Write, bitch! Write!"



Managed to sneak in some writing at work today. Earned that "Secret Noveling" merit badge. Yippee.

It's always strange to be writing about a minority culture that I'm not part of. I grew up with kids whose parents spoke only Spanish, so I'm not exactly writing in a void, but I'm still seeing it through a white, Protestant, lower-middle-cass filter. Of course, my main character is also seeing it through that filter, but the Hispanic friends whose daily lives I shared were back in junior high and high school. Of course I had to speak Spanish on a frequent basis in one of my past jobs as a reference librarian, but that was more professional contact than personal. There's definitely a stronger/larger Hispanic subculture in Indiana today than there was 15 years ago.

But speaking from a completely shallow viewpoint, writing a scene about Dia de los Muertos definitely adds to your word count.

Broke the dreaded 30k today. I'm still 5,000 words behind, but that's okay. I wrote over 5,000 words today, so I can still catch up. LOL

Dumped some frustration and angst on my min character today. Also a Stunning Revelation, and a moment of UST. Still having fun. I hope I have enoguh for another 20k of book though. I only have four plot cards left. Clearly I need to spend some quality time plotting tomorrow.

Maybe at work, provided the 9 am meeting doesn't mean my job is going away earlier than expected. *crosses fingers*

I officially crossed the halfway mark tonight. I know I'm still three days behind, but I think I can catch up by Sunday night at the latest.

I hit some sad, heavy backstory stuff tonight as I wrote. I hope it wasn't too much infodump, but there hasn't been a great place to work the information in until now. I could have Chloe telling Brax about what happened, but honestly that would be out of character. It would be out of character for her to tell ANYONE, though my goal is for her to be in a place that she could tell Brax, by the end of the novel. Part of her story arc is learning to trust, particularly learning to trust a man. We'll see if she cooperates on that one. Heh.

WOOHOO!!!



I have revised my graphs down to 50k instead of 75k, because I'm going to keep hoping for 75k but right now I just want to catch up with where I should be for 50.

I made a lot of progress tonight! Just over 4300 words, and if I hadn't had Criminal Minds on tonight, I probably would have crossed 5k for the day. Then again, I stopped on a high note, and astraea36 is going to hate me tomorrow when she gets THAT cliffhanger. :D

Sometimes what I need, obviously, is for someone to read what I have and say, "Yes, you're doing good, keep going." And since I was questioning my pacing, I needed someone to read a big chunk at a time and say, "No, you're doing all right, now focus on THIS part of the plot for a while." astraea36 has been great for daily encouragement (as have several other people who aren't reading), and microgirl8225 gave me a kick in the pants and got me back on track today.

My writing friends are awesome. Completely awesome.

So I've been stalled here for the past four days:



I did all kinds of plotting on Friday. I scratched out about 10 words Saturday. Didn't even try Sunday. Didn't try last night. Gave the novel to microgirl8225, who's been awesome at kicking me back into gear in the past. Scratched out a couple hundred words tonight.

I'm really far behind, but it's still doable. Today's word count was 25k+some change.

I guess I'll look at it this way--now I'm super qualified for that Rally Merit Badge. *G*

Whew! Thanks to wordwars with microgirl8225, mingsmommy, kyrdwyn, cuspofqueens, and severity_softly, I was able to add a LOT of words tonight. I'm back above where I need to be to get my 50,000 in. I've been using 75k as my target, but if I went with 50k my graph would look more like this:



Yesterday I did do a lot of character/plot work via the Plotting a Novel in One Hour exercise, and I figured out the connection between the crimes and the big issue Chloe is facing, so that's awesome. Hopefully everything I've got so far makes sense, even if I have to do a lot of editing later. :D

My NaNo tip for the day: When in doubt, burn someone's house down. You learn all kinds of things about a character when their house is on fire.



I am still feeling upbeat about this novel and loving these characters. But I really really need to learn that surfing LJ, watching Mean Kitty videos, and reading about online plagiarism scandals, does not get my daily word count done.

Managed my word count and Criminal Minds both.



Introduced the love interest, who threw me a curveball plotwise. And now I really need to go to bed.

I hope this is still funny.

Not bad, but not great. I still made forward motion, and I definitely got a better handle on Jason and Martin, who are secondary characters to Chloe. I decided to keep the first person POV, because that really gives Chloe a lot of her voice. Plus it's sort of the convention for supernatural crime/paranormal/urban fantasy. Haven't figured out yet if moving the setting from Indianapolis to rural Indiana is the way to go, but I'll decide that later. Unfortunately I got too distracted by researching stupid little details like:

Would a mouthy but devout 38-year-old call Michael the Archangel "Saint Mike"? (Probably.)

Is Saint Michael, in fact, the patron saint of cops? (He is.)

Who won the Indiana Senatorial race? (Coats.)

But I got a scene written, and while I'm not quite on track for my own personal goal (75,000 words), I'm doing okay for the official NaNo wordcount. Hurrah! Of course, tomorrow I have to buckle down and write early, because Criminal Minds is on at 9 and while I'll give up Warcraft for NaNo, I won't give up CM.