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Just to show you how non-bloggy I've been the last month or so, and how fully immersed in NaNoWriMo, let me confess to you right here and right now that it's been so bad that I completely forgot to even mention the writing contest that I won earlier this month.
Well, this brief post is to remedy that. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 17abbi, badge, Blogging, competition, horror, JackRubashevskiy, lostmidtranslation, NaNoWriMo, Protagonize, ribbon, Tales of Terror, winner, writing competition
Well, I've gone and done it. I've signed up for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it's affectionately known). I'm going to spend the month of November immersed in words. The object is to write over 1600 words a day in order to amass a thirty-day total of 50,000 words, the equivalent of a short novel.
I did something like this three years ago, when I purchased a book entitled No Plot? No Problem!, written by Chris Baty, the originator of NaNoWriMo. The book goes into great detail about how the thirty-day novel works and gives some excellent advice and suggestions. So, although I haven't "officially" done NaNoWriMo before now, I did write an "unofficial" thirty-day novel in the middle of the summer.
The damn thing still isn't finished, though. I wrote the requisite number of words, but I didn't finish the story. And there it sits. I've read through it a number of times in the past three years, and I really like most of it, but I haven't added anything new to it. I know where it's going, and I know some of the scenes I want to write, but I haven't written them yet.
This is typical of me. I write a bunch of stuff, and then I let it sit unfinished for eons. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Chris Baty, Dr. Wicked, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, No Plot? No Problem!, Protagonize, Thirty Day Novel, Write or Die
I'm using another new, free writing tool to compose this entry. It's called Write or Die, and it's not a product that you download and install on your computer. It's a writing tool on a website. You just go to the site, tell it how many words you intend to write, how much time you're giving yourself to write them, and how strict the site should be as you type away.
But let me back up a bit, here. This is not a writing tool for the faint of heart. This is a tool for people who seriously want to get some wordage down. It's a nagging tool. It's the closest thing you'll find to a schoolmarm with granny-glasses standing behind you and whacking you with a pointer if you pause too long in your writing.
I'm using this site for the first time today (okay, it's actually the second time, but the first time, a couple of days ago, was a bust, because I was seriously interrupted and had to abort the whole process), so I don't yet know all the ins and outs, but this is basically what happens: Once you've entered your proposed word-count and the time you're allowing yourself (and optionally setting the level of strictness you want brought down upon you), you click the big "Write" button, and off you go! You're taken to a page with nothing on it but a big text-entry field with a countdown timer and a word count at the bottom. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Blogging, Dr. Wicked, Internet, NaNoWriMo, productivity, Protagonize, Tasha Noble, Write or Die, WriteMonkey, Writing
"Karen ran quickly out her front door, frantically waving the small, brown package she held in her trembling hand, but the red, white, and blue Grumman van was moving rapidly away from her, carelessly kicking up a trail of dust as it lurched towards the intersection, where it turned sharply to the right and instantly disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
Karen sighed and dropped her heavy arm to her side. What was she to do now? The smudged, stained label on the abused box did not have her name or address on it.
It belonged to someone else."
The above passage is, fortunately, not a quote from a novel I've read. I constructed it just now, and it's horrible.
Intentionally. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: adjectives, adverbs, bad writing, Blogging, Noah Lukeman, Protagonize, Tasha_Noble, The First Five Pages, Writing
Here’s the second guest post I mentioned on Sunday, this one by another of my Protagonize friends, Asheyna. I want to extend my thanks to her, both for posting here and for letting me post on her blog. Sounds like the barter system, don’t it?
I was so excited when Faltarego asked for guest posts on his Twitter and for some crazy reason decided to allow me to write something. Then life happened and I wasn’t really able to write, as so often happens. I could have written… but I highly doubt rants on the world’s lack of common sense would have made it past the review. Thankfully Faltarego is a super nice person and hasn’t harassed me at all for my lack of writing ability.
Met Faltarego over on Protagonize, which is a truly awesome website, and if he doesn’t post about it I’m going to sneak back over here and do it myself! He’s the one that really introduced me to the idea of writing fan fiction. I’d read some Harry Potter fanfic which was pretty good but had never thought about it beyond that. Then he harassed me into joining the Fan Fiction group he moderated.
The more I thought about fanfic the more I realized why I liked it. It’s Open Source writing! For those who don’t know what Open Source is, Faltarego wrote an excellent guest post on my blog (shameless plug) that goes into what exactly it is and where it came from. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: fan fiction, Google, Harry Potter, James Bond, Open Source, Protagonize, Star Trek
