Posted by barb on Dec 1, 2004 in
Writing Total word count: 14,490 words
Way short of the 50,000 word requirement to “win”. My enthusiasm petered out about half-way through the month when I decided that my underlying story sucked. I’m not so sure, now, that it actually sucks, but I do need to iron out the details between the major plot points. Frankly, I’m still looking at this as a win for Barb — it’s the most words I’ve ever written in one month. Yay me! Maybe next year I’ll get over 20,000. And I will be doing this again next year.
Posted by barb on Nov 16, 2004 in
Writing I’m finding it hard to motivate myself to write every night…in fact, I seem to only manage every other night. Sigh. Once I start writing, the words generally flow quite easily, but it’s that initial push that I have trouble with. I’m going to keep trying, though. And I’ve suggested to Mushi that we commit to kamikaze writing the day after Thanksgiving…I’m sure our respective husbands will be happy to serve us pop and snacks as necessary.
Total word count: 12,057
Posted by barb on Nov 14, 2004 in
Writing I broke 10,000 words today! Yay! I’m still behind, but who cares? I’m writing, which is more than I can say about the past several months.
Total word count: 10,062
Posted by barb on Nov 12, 2004 in
Writing Okay, so I think I’ve resigned myself that I’m not going to “win”, where winning means completing a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and 30. I’m not giving up, I’m just starting to see the reality. November is such a bad month for me…in fact, any month that falls between the Autumnal and Vernal Equinoxes is bad. Why? In a word, SAD. It’s about all I can do each morning to get out of bed when the sun rises after I do and sets just after I get home from work. Doing anything in the evenings becomes very difficult, since I’ve used all of my energy just functioning for 8-hours of work.
Having said that, I rallied tonight and wrote 2,253 words. I hit a scene where I really felt in my element after struggling with myself to get started. I’ve gone over 7,500 words. I haven’t given up, I’m still going to try to write like a maniac. However, if I don’t complete 50,000 words, I’m going to be satisfied that I’ve written the most I’ve ever written in one month.
Total words: 7,606
Posted by barb on Nov 10, 2004 in
Writing A brilliant plot point came to me last night in bed, and I fleshed it out a bit in traffic this afternoon. It’s in the later part of the novel, but I jumped ahead and wrote that part tonight. I’ll have to figure out how to fill in the middle, but I have some ideas for that. Still quite behind in my word count, but my goal for tomorrow is to catch up some. I won’t make my total word count goal of 22,000 words (2,000 words per day average), but I’ll hopefully get close to 10,000 words.
Total word count: 5,002
Posted by barb on Nov 9, 2004 in
Writing Back from Minnesota, and so I’m back to writing. I have a lot to make up, but tonight was not the night for that. So far I’m up to 4,022 words…only 45,978 left. At least more of the plot started coming around tonight — a new development that promises to be more interesting than the twist I discovered on my first night of writing. Yay! I’m hoping to make up more writing over Veteran’s Day (one benefit of working as a government contractor) and Thanksgiving.
Total word count: 4,022
Posted by barb on Nov 2, 2004 in
Writing I’m up to 3,020 words. Not as many as I’d hoped, but I needed to get a few things done this evening, plus I had a monster headache. The next few days are going to be difficult, with a meeting tomorrow night with our wedding photographer about our big, expensive, keepsake album, and then Thursday night we leave for Minnesota for the weekend. I’m going to bring Andrew’s laptop and try to continue writing, but I have a feeling that I’ll be playing catch-up next week.
The story sucks so far, but I’m not letting myself go back and change things too much. I really just want to get a story down on paper that I can go back to later, do some research on a few things, clean up the plot, add more description and beef up the characters. For now I’m just forcing myself to put words on paper. I don’t actually know where the story is going, but I had my first peek last night into the conflict of the novel.
Posted by barb on Nov 1, 2004 in
Writing Well, it’s not exactly great literature, but I’ve gotten a start on my NaNoWriMo novel. Total words for today: 1,977.
Posted by barb on Jul 14, 2004 in
Writing I’m enrolled in a community education writing class, and the first class met tonight. It should prove quite interesting. The teacher is Elaine Raco Chase, who has written many books including romances, mysteries, non-fiction, and women’s fiction. She is the kind of person that I’d like to just sit down with and let her talk for hours and take notes. She wrote the first romance novel that made it to the New York Times’ Bestseller’s List. She wrote for one episode of Saturday Night Live during the first season, but was the only one not on drugs, so only lasted the one episode. She currently suffers from short-term memory loss, due to an accident with a drunk driver, after which she was in a coma. Her husband was involved in creating closed-captioning for TV. She had interesting stories about other authors (like Clive Barker’s fans coming up to him and pricking their fingers so he could sign their books in their blood).
Anyway, our assignment for the week is to pick a character-driven TV show, and observe the different characters, taking note of their age, description, body type, etc. We’re also supposed to start awakening our senses — paying attention to all sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures. Finally, we need to find a picture that resembles a character that we want to work with for the next several weeks.
Posted by barb on Nov 13, 2003 in
Writing Since I shared a piece at last week’s class, I figured I wouldn’t have to this week. I did bring something, but it wasn’t my best work. In fact, I had just thrown it together last night, edited it briefly this morning, and left it at that. Ugh. For the most part, it seemed to go over well, but not nearly as well as the piece last week.
The instructor has decided to teach Short Stories 2 next semester, and she’s only going to let students already enrolled in our class into the class next semester. I’m looking forward to it, because then I’ll get to see how some of these stories end.
Also, Shannon and I have decided to get together outside class to talk about our writing. Yay! She was the only person in the class that I felt drawn to, and oddly enough, she seemed to have the same idea. She won’t be at next week’s class, so we exchanged numbers tonight. Hopefully we’ll get together the first week in December. That means I’ll be responsible to someone for writing something new every week.