You’d think I’d learn by now that I’m not nearly an accomplished enough blogger to keep posting throughout November. Actually I think I did a fairly good job of it, all things considering. You would also think that I’d learn by now that, even outside of NaNoWriMo, November is never not insane. The shit always hits the fan in November. Last year it was chemo and a busted car window, this year it was a malware attack,  crippled right hand, and chronic scheduling changes.

I made it. Another 50k in the can! A complete, very rough first draft. Over all I’m quite happy with it. I can tell it’s going to fundamentally change a lot before it ever reaches the light of day, and that I don’t see myself returning to it anytime soon. But it’s out of my head and in a file, where it can properly… ferment. Hm, I like that comparison. Ferment. Like cheese.

This book taught me a bit about reader expectation, and how to manipulate it. Among the many possible endings I found several that I had to dismiss simply because no matter how clever they were the reader would have finished the book feeling cheated, and that’s something I don’t want. A lot of this story hinges on the readers’ expectations, and there will be a need for careful balance between foreshadowing and misdirecting for the Big Twist. I’m going to start revising my pitch for it, so as not to spoil that twist. Or maybe I won’t, because the whole story would octopus the opposite direction and the story could be about something else entirely, and the current Big Twist could be a minor element of the greater whole.

Ah, first drafts – got to love ‘em. Duologies too – I’m finding that they are quite fun to plot. I’m sure that’s going to come back to bite me some day. They seem to be a hard sell, but then again I’m seeing more and more of them so maybe they are coming into fashion? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Typical me, I’m already ponder next NaNoWriMo’s story. It’s an addictive process. I’ve got an Urban Fantasy detective story with a shapeshifter that more or less strode in the front door with a chesshire grin, and several opportunities to try my hand at a sequel.

50808 / 50000 words. 102% done!

It figure my site would go down this week, because it’s release week! Sword & Sorceress 26, which includes my story The Girl Who Folded Dragons was released this Wednesday – it’s currently available at Amazon(hardcopy AND on the Kindle) and at Barnes & Noble! And last week my (very first!) interview went up on Jonathan Moeller’s website. It’s been an exciting/busy week!

I’ve managed to push through the soggy middle of my NaNo, at least I hope I’m on the other side of the worst of it, and have reached 32k! Skyward Sword is coming out this Sunday, and for the moment all is well. So I will leave you with this awesome video from the Zelda Symphony.

32450 / 50000 words. 65% done!

I’m still in that early part of the draft before I’ve connected with the characters and where I realize that I haven’t thought about POV at all. Nothing much of note has happened – I’m in the middle of establishing the ‘Ordinary World’ and have just shoved the inciting incident at the main character. So for lack of anything else to talk about I thought I’d share my starting playlist for this NaNo. It will undoubtably change a lot during the month, so maybe I’ll share it again at the end for comparison. I find I need high energy songs with strong beats to write, and that I zone out when songs don’t have lyrics. I’m a bit of an odd duck among writers for that.

• Judas – Lady Gaga
• Iron – Woodkid
• Young Men Dead – The Black Angels
• Crashing Down – Heather Dale
• Smooth Criminal – 2Cello
• Letters From The Sky – Civil Twilight
• The Queen of Argyll – Silly Wizard
• Rox In The Box – The Decemberists
• This Is Why We Fight – The Decemberists
• Dance With The Devil – Breaking Benjamin
• Runs In The Family – Amanda Palmer
• Lose Yourself – Eminem
• Bad Son – Jed Whedon and the Willing
• Wicked Blood – Sea Wolf
• You Are – Splashdown
• Rolling In The Deep – Adele
• Young Blood – Norah Jones
• Varulven – Garmarna
• Carry On Wayward Son - Kansas
• What You Want – Evanescence

The steamer for today’s meeting was the special – raspberry, blueberry, and white chocolate. I’m open to suggestions for the next meeting. :)

2416 / 50000 words. 5% done!

This year I’m going back to straight up Fantasy. ‘The Empty Throne’ is the story of what happens twenty-odd years after an Evil Overlord is defeated. It’s based on what I’m calling ‘The Princess Peach Scenario’ – what if the ‘Evil Overlord’ wasn’t that bad? Evil sure, but a gentlemen. ‘The Empty Throne concerns The Hero’s two sons, the return of the empire, and dark family secrets. I also discovered while outlining that it really solidly wants to be a duology – it breaks very neatly in half, with two complete story arcs.

My toolbox this year is more or less the same as last year, with a few notable additions that I wanted to share.

The Necessary Programs -
RoughDraft – for the actual writing. I find it minimalist and non-distracting. The notepad sidebar feature is infinitely useful, from quick notes about character descriptions to quick math after word wars, all without leaving the program.
OneNote – I don’t know how I lived without OneNote. It has all my story bibles in one place.
iTunes – *shrug* That’s where I have all my music loaded and sorted into playlists.
Spotify – Imagine iTunes injected with rocket fuel. Sit through the occasionally add and listen to just about any song you want for free.
Dropbox – There is no excuse for not backing up. Especially during NaNo.
F.lux – A simple little program that adjusts the color of the screen, reducing eyestrain and making sleep sounder. Extremely useful for nightowls like me.
Write Or Die – I’d never read 50,000 without it! The Online EditMinion is equally useful for quick edits.

Also, for the month of November I’ve set myself a mini-challenge. As I’ll be at Kaladi a lot during the month, and steamers are both one of my favorite things and one of the cheapest things there, I’ve decided I will not have the same flavor combination twice during NaNo. Last Saturday at the kickoff I had a blackberry/cinnamon steamer – better than you’d think, though it left an odd aftertaste.

7 days until NaNoWriMo. 27 days until Skyward Sword comes out. We’ll see who wins this November. :3

A week ago I received the contract for my first sale of a short story. “The Girl Who Folded Dragons” will appear in Sword & Sorceress 26, due out in November from Norilana Books.

Its been a surreal and emotional week. Having a story in Sword & Sorceress has been a mini-dream of mine for nearly as long as I have been writing. The first writing advice I ever received was from the introductions of each volume. I read them over and over, absorbing and dreaming.

I only wish my dad could have been here to see me achieve this. I promised him that this is my year, and I guess it is.

One other thing – my friend Heather’s second story, “Soiled Doves” in the anthology How The West Was Wicked, is now available from Pill Hill Press on the Nook and the Kindle.

Recently I read The Genius Wars by Catherine Jinks. Part three in a high tech, high action YA trilogy which I can’t recommend enough. It got me thinking about proactive protagonists; in a lot of stories characters only react, and that in and of itself is not a bad thing – most post-apocalypse stories are about reactions, and that’s what make them fascinating. But only having reaction can also be a sign of weak writing. Proactive characters are simply more interesting; they twist and drive the plot, keeping the energy high and spinning the story in new directions.

I’ve been working on finishing Keepers; mostly I’ve been struggling to get past it’s eternally sticky opening. And it is a very sticky opening – while the bulk of the story has remained unchanged, and I have an idea of how things go down, the opening chapters have gone through more iterations then I can count. The most recent changes have come about from the realization that the characters weren’t being active enough. Their inactivity was slowing down the plot, requiring a great many plot devices just to go things going. There is only so many times Adventure can Call, you know? Especially when the characters seem to have caller id for it.

I’m currently somewhere in the middle of chapter two, though it’s kind of hard to tell where since I wrote half of it, then realized it needed to open a completely different way. Anyway, I’m about 3400 words in, which is sadly the farthest I’ve gotten in quite awhile. I’ve decided to be proactive myself – this is going to be the last attempt. If it doesn’t come together this time then it is going to be trunked.

Here’s my fingers crossed.

I’ll admit I feel a bit intimidated by this challenge. I cast about in my writing group before signing up, because there was no way I was going to do this challenge by myself. I’m plagued by doubts – my mom says to do the weekly challenge, but I fear I’ll be struggling just to keep up with a monthly challenge. It’s been hard enough for me to keep up with my goal of at least two blog posts a week, and to keep moving forward with my novel. But, like France, I’ll do it anyway.

My progress chart is thataway. It’s currently set up for the weekly challenge. Perhaps I shall use the remaining hours in 2010 to reread Zen in the Art of Writing, my favorite writing book after Stephen King’s On Writing. And if in the next couple of months I’m found gibbering in a corner somewhere… well, at least you’ll know what happened.

Whether it’s the extending amounts of time away from the internet, thanks to two long housesitting trips, or the arrival of autumn, which always seems to put my fingers to the keys, I’ve been managing to do a little bit of writing everyday. A few days all I’ve managed has been journal entries, but I’ll take it.

My current project, aside from gathering what I’ll need for this year’s NaNoWriMo, is my little mind-gremlin of the last four plus years – Keepers(nee Covenant Cross). An urban fantasy story from before there was such a thing, it’s gone through so many incarnations that I’m not even going to bother to tally half of them. And now for the first time I feel like the story is moving forward – the pot on the back burner is bubbling over, demanding attention.

In the last month alone I’ve thrown over half of the words I’ve written, but it’s all been for a good cause – the first 900 to die were because I didn’t want to deal with a whole Chekhov’s Army in chapter one, and the most recent 1k is getting kicked out because it managed to bleed all tension from the scene. I’m learning that I’m the sort who likes to kill their darlings as soon as they start causing problems. ;)

Keepers currently stands at around 2200 words and roughly halfway through chapter one. It’s not much, but it’s growing steadily. Let’s see how far I can get before NaNoWriMo descends upon me.

1 – Eight hour writing meetings are counter productive. You’d think you could get a lot of words in during eight hours, but put enough writers in a room together for that much time and it ceases to be a work session and instead turns into a party. As an ML it was even worse – I had to hurry to get there to secure the room, so I started out tired, and then I’d catch my breath in time for one or two hours of decent work before the whole thing wore me out. The up side to being an ML is that I can make sure that eight hour write-ins never happen again.

2 – I don’t do fairies. Back when I came up for the idea for last year’s novel I was really into Fairies. Then the post-Twilight Urban Fantasy/YA boom happened and pretty much ruined fairies for me via over saturation. In theory I still like fairies, but in practice I’ve thoroughly lost my taste for them. I thought maybe I’d like them if I wrote them, but unfortunately that’s not how things turned out. I think I’m going to stick with vampires for now.

3 – Make sure there is enough story for 50,000 words. I intended for Fairy’s Book to have a sort of serial/anthology/monster-of-the-week story, and in it’s first incarnation it was a manga. Going into November I had only outlined the beginning and the end, figuring I could pull from folklore for the middle as I went along. That turned out to be a big mistake. I ended up wrapping up the story at around 25,000 words – halfway to the goal – and I filled out the remaining words with a hasty rewrite of a fanfic. It wasn’t pretty.

4 – Don’t slack off. I didn’t even realize that I was running out of story until the later half of week three, and the idiom ‘skin of my teeth’ comes to mind for the last day typing frenzy that just barely put me over 50k. This year I’m going to put my family on notice – 2k or no dinner.

5 – Love your idea. My biggest failure during last year’s NaNoWriMo was the sheer injustice I did to a perfectly nice idea. A lot of the struggle and slacking off came about because I simply wasn’t in love with the idea I had come up with. I didn’t have any drive to explore it’s world or characters, and the story and I suffered for it.

Perhaps some day I’ll come back to Fairy’s Book and find the missing element that is needed to make it all work. But for now I’m taking these lessons to heart. I already have my story for this year lined up and partially outlined, and very idea of it makes me giddy. Angels and demons and conspiracies oh my!