Tag: NaNo

Tomorrow is NaNo

Tomorrow, I commit myself to writing 2000 words a day for the next month, I’ll be honest; I’m not as motivated for this as I’d like.

I have a lot of documents to edit (now that my developmental editor lets me know what’s not working). I have a novel that needs 25,000 more words.

On the other hand, there’s feeling a part of something bigger than me. NaNo is huge. NaNo is worldwide. NaNo comes with its own motivation.

Oh, this is such a hard decision! I’ll keep you posted.

Plantsing

It’s less than two weeks till NaNoWriMo, and I’m working on motivating myself for another year. I don’t have any new ideas for books, but I’m writing a book I tried to write for NaNo in 2016. It’s light and fluffy — it’s a romantic mystery that involves Santas, and I’m going to have to find time to outline it before I start.

There are, according to NaNos, pantsers and planners. Pantsers are those who write freestyle, by the seat of their pants. Planners are those who come in with a complete outline and follow it carefully.

I’m a plantser. Plantsers have a bare sketch of topics and fill them in freeform, and later edit for sense. We have not so much an outline as a list of chapter headings and a bare idea of what those prompts mean.

It’s a fun way to write for someone who trusts their imagination and trusts they can pick up all the plot holes in the edit.

***************
For all my Maryville MO readers, NaNoWriMo starts November 1st. You can sign up — you know you want to write a novel! — at nanowrimo.org And if you decide to write a novel, please come drop in to the Board Game Cafe Thursday nights in November (November 1st, 8th, 15th, 29th) from 6-10 PM for a writing space with other writers! 

what I needed to believe

So I thought I was going to quit writing for a little while. Too many rejections. Too much hard work with no payoff. Too much frustration about the process.

But yesterday in class, I was teaching my students a technique of getting clients to set goals. The method uses a simple question: “Tell me what  you want your life to be like five years from now.” I had the students try the question on themselves.

So, naturally, I turned the question on myself. And do you know what?

I still want to become a published author, even though I have been working on that goal for five years and it hasn’t happened yet.

I also finally figured out what I’m writing for NaNo.

A romance novel featuring the Secret Society of Santas. Novel #2 in that series. (Novel 1 needs a dev edit, but it’s somewhere down the line).

I’m not giving up yet.

I don’t know what to write!

NaNoWriMo is approaching, (November 1st)  and I don’t know what to write.

I’ve been in editing mode — Apocalypse is a good amount of the way done edit-wise, while I just got handed back my first novel, Gaia’s Hands, from the developmental editor. I have enough editing for the next couple months at least.

But NaNo is about writing, not editing.

I haven’t written new for a while because of my editing needs. Although I haven’t finished Whose Hearts are Mountains, there’s not enough material left to make the 50,000 word total for NaNo.

I need an idea for a new novel by November 1.

I have a couple on the back burner: the sequel to Voyageurs, where our two characters time travel to stop the end of the world due to climate change, but that doesn’t appeal to me. In fact, I feel like I’ve backed myself into a corner writing a book that obviously has a sequel. It’s not just the research I would have to do, but the fact that I don’t know if I have enough plot to support the 80,000 word minimum for whatever genre it is.

The other involves an Archetype war with hideous implications for humans. I am so far away from the Archetype universe right now that I don’t know if I can create this.

I need inspiration — help!

Muse, if you’re out there, inspire me!

The World Needs Your Novel

Are you familiar with NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) is an annual writing contest where there are no prizes but a certificate and the only one you’re competing against is yourself. The name comes from a contraction of “National Novel Writing Month” but has grown far beyond its bounds, with international reach.
Every November, thousands of writers and aspiring writers unite over the Web for NaNo.  Each will write toward a goal of a written work of 50,000 words.  In October 2016 (the last year for which data is available), almost 400,000 participants worldwide participated, with 34,000 people finishing the 50,000 word goal (Office of Letters and Light, 2016). The NaNo website provides blurbs of advice from writers, encouragement emails, and forums where people can ask for advice, seek information, and at times lament lack of progress.

​​

The motto of NaNo is “The World Needs Your Novel”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the world needs your novel to be published. With Google making research easy and the boom in potential writers, those who seek an agent may never get one and those who self-publish may find their works mouldering in a corner of the Internet. Nowadays, having your work read may be more a matter of search engine optimization than the quality of your writing.
I struggle with this all the time. I do not write for the market; I write from my heart, which is deep and quirky. My heroes are pacifists and horticulturists. Nobody has rippling muscles; my sexiest hero is androgynous. I persist, however, in writing and posting some of my works on Wattpad and sending manuscripts to agents who tell me “It’s not you, it’s me”. 
I persevere because, deep down, I believe the world needs my novel. Not in a way that makes me famous (Fame actually makes me nervous). But in a way that makes people take a deep breath and think. And feel. And look at things like pacifism, environmentalism. and love differently than before. All I need to do is get my writing into their hands.
And there we are — back to the hard part.

Office of Letters and Light (2017). Press release 2017. Available: https://nanowrimo.org/press. [April 14, 2018].

Going back and editing early

My final total for NaNoWriMo is 74,171 words — but the novel, Whose Hearts are Mountains, is not yet done. I’m actually going back to what I’ve written already and editing before I write the last section — in this case not subtracting, but adding foreshadowing, correcting details and making the earlier parts consistent with what I learn about the character later.

Why am I doing this instead of plowing ahead and going back later? Because the things I want to correct are bugging me. Like what signs do we have that Anna has the push-pull of a human side (wanting touch and contact) and Archetype sign (reserved, not emotive)? Not too much. Do we know about her stepfather’s past? No, but hoo boy, I discovered it yesterday and it’s big. Do we know why her natural father is so broken? No, I need to put that in. Do I have the chronology right? I hope so, because I’m really bad with time.

I hope this busts my writers’ block. I hope this makes me feel better about this novel. I need coffee now — today’s coffee is Costa Rican Tarrazu, roasted last night.

A NaNo Success Story

As you noticed from the title, today’s post is called “A NaNo Success Story”. But it’s not my story, which you’ve already heard — more than once.

This is my husband’s story.

For those of you who don’t know my husband, his name is Richard Leach-Steffens, and he looks like this (the person who isn’t me):

We were both a bit chubbier then.

He is universally regarded as the sweetest guy in the universe. He has a couple quirks, but so do we all. One of his more obvious quirks is that he has trouble finding words, and instead of a stammer, he uses grand arm gestures to try to coax the word out of hiding. (In the fashion of married people, I have picked up this habit, except I also say “uh … thingie” while trying to remember).

Richard has always wanted to write. When I asked him what job he dreamed of when he was younger, he said, “I wanted to be a traveling restaurant critic, but I have writer’s block.” I thought he had the perfect job idea, by the way: travel, eat, write, get paid. I’m still wondering why I didn’t come up with this.

When I started participating in NaNoWriMo, I invited Richard to participate with me. “But I don’t have ideas!” I knew that Richard had ideas, because he helped me with ideas all the time. Many a car ride and coffee hour has been spent bouncing ideas off him, and him bouncing ideas off me.

Richard, like many, dipped his toes in writing through Camp NaNo, a less strenuous version of NaNo, where one could set their own goal. Richard’s first project was part 1 of a novel based on one of the characters in my series of novels, Arnie Majors, the D.B. Cooper of draft resistors. His second Camp project was part 2 of the same book. He felt comfortable writing in an established world, because although he’d gotten comfortable with his writing, he didn’t feel comfortable with his imagination.

Last year, Richard started (and completed) his first NaNo book. Again, it was based on my Archetype world, but he took a character mentioned once in passing and created a book around her story. It’s clearly his book and not mine — yet it’s true to the universe. He made his word count goal in time, so he won.

This year, Richard wrote a book with his ideas, his imagination, start to finish. It’s soft Science Fiction, very conceptual — in other words, his kind of book. (His Master’s is in history, specifically military history; my PhD is in Family Economics, with a bunch of sociology and psychology thrown in).

Think about this — Richard had writers’ block. He didn’t trust his ideas, he didn’t trust his imagination, he didn’t trust his writing skills. He now has one book to finish and then three to edit in case he wants to publish (and torture himself the way I torture myself trying to get published).

He’s a NaNo success story.

50,000 is just a beginning

I’ve met my NaNo goal in half a month.
Phew!
But this novel writing is just beginning…

There’s about 40,000-50,000 words left to write, and then there’s editing, editing, and more editing. There’s letting other people read it for reactions. There’s marketing it to an agent.

But that’s okay.

Phew!

An excerpt — and the home stretch.

I am in the home stretch with 4000 words left. I might hit the goal today; I might not. I will keep writing till at least the end of the month; it’s possible if I keep this rate up I’ll be close to the end of the book. I doubt I will, however — I’m traveling for a writers’ retreat over (American) Thanksgiving.

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday (really rough). Our protagonist, Annie Smith,  has accepted an invitation to the intentional community Hearts are Mountains, built in northern Nevada in the Owyhee Desert, for fuel and water. There are a few mysteries that Annie doesn’t quite register:

I realized, as we went down another circular stairwell, that the underground building was a cylinder longer than it was wide. This being the central cylinder, the rooms appeared to be for collective use. Doors led to, I presumed, the other cylinders below the greenhouses. The layer below the great room served as a craft production room, and below that a root cellar and food storage area, with a full quarter of the area used for — 

“Water reclamation?” I asked, spying the tall cylindrical powered unit.

“Got it in one,” Daniel nodded. “We run the unit on skinky — generated outside, of course — supplemented with jatropha, which we grow in one of the domes, and castor, which we grow on the opposite side of the animals so they don’t eat the beans and die.” He indicated the large unit again. “One of the biggest hazards of living in underground units is the humidity level — too much humidity, believe it or not, makes underground living very unpleasant.”

“This is a pretty sophisticated setup,” I remarked, looking at concrete and metal. “Pardon me for asking, but doesn’t this setup require a lot of money?”

Daniel paused for a long moment. I wondered if I had broken a taboo among these people by mentioning money. “I’m sorry — “ I blurted out.

“No, really, it’s fine. It’s hard to explain our funding for this, however. We built this with seed money and sweat equity. Although the cement habitats are prefab, we installed them ourselves. This one goes about seventy feet into the ground, while the others — living spaces — go down about sixty. As you can tell, almost all our living spaces are underground; we had to do some deep digging, and I don’t know if the site has fully recovered after twenty years.”

We walked up three flights of circular stairs past the root cellar and the peaceful crafts room, where a man sat, spinning fiber — 

“Derek,” Daniel called out, “say hi to Annie. She’s having dinner with us.”

Derek, a pale man with incredibly long, pale hair, gave us a puzzled look and then smiled. “Hi, Annie,” he said and turned back to his work.

“Is he Kirsten’s brother?”

“Twins. They’re extremely rare among …” he let his voice trail off, and I wondered how the sentence would have ended.

“You don’t get visitors here often, do you?” I queried in what I suspected was a grave understatement.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Courier New’}

“Not too many people are into rock climbing these days,” Daniel shrugged.