Category: NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo Day 7: Just Write

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo5 Comments

Sometimes things work out.  I hit the end of my scene and my inspiration this evening, did a word count check, and found that I was exactly, to the word, at the point I had hoped to reach.  I’m actually a full day’s worth of words ahead on the goal, which is what I need because I’ll be out of town for work tomorrow–which means I’ll be lucky to write anything.

I’ve been able to run ahead of the goal most days so far–yesterday was less because I was distracted by my civic duty, and both voting and election coverage cut into my writing time.  I still got about a thousand words down, though, and managed to be about on target today.

I expected today to be a slog.  I just wasn’t feeling it.  But I sat down and wrote anyway, and the scene came out…pretty good.  And Michael and Maggie had a bit of a moment that I certainly didn’t plan, so it was nice of them to be on top of these things. 🙂

I also had a rather entertaining time looking up poisonous plants.  Don’t ever eat foxgloves.

Here’s an excerpt from a day or two ago.  In a previous scene Maggie found a letter left behind by the deceased Princess Rebecca, which among other things advised watching the Grey Ladies, the nasty king’s mysterious attendants…

            The midday meal gave Maggie her first opportunity to watch the Grey Ladies.  She wished Rebecca had said what to watch them for.  “All is not as it seems” was so vague as to be practically useless, really.  Obviously something was strange; four women swathed in shreds of gray veils could hardly be called normal by any standard. Continue reading “NaNoWriMo Day 7: Just Write” →

NaNoWriMo, Day 4: Lightning Bolts (the good kind)

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo1 Comment

We’re finishing up the first weekend of NaNoWriMo!  I was lucky to have a fairly quiet couple of days, so I’ve been able to get a nice jump on my word count–even though I also went to my writing group on Friday.  🙂  Right now I’m about 2,000 words ahead of the goal, which is very good because I know I’ll have a couple of days next week with very little time to write.

So far I’m enjoying the pace, especially the way the process moves so much faster when I write like this.  Inspiration has been coming at a rapid rate so far, and those lightning bolt “oh, that’s how it should work!” moments are among my favorite parts of writing.  I don’t know if I could sustain this long-term, but it seems to work for a month–or at least four days so far…

My biggest lightning bolt up to now has helped me (I think) work out one of my biggest plot problems previously.  You see, my premise got me into a very particular corner.  The whole concept of the book started when I was reading fairy tales and somehow sparked off this idea about an imprisoned hero who has no actual ability to fight the monster, but keeps standing up to defend the heroine anyway.  The villain finds that funny, and backs off–until the next day.  And so it keeps repeating day after day.

I loved the dynamic of that interaction, and I think I’ve been able to write it to really work for the hero.  The trouble was, it didn’t work at all for Maggie, my heroine.  For the dynamic to work, Michael can’t have an actual chance when he stands up to the evil king, which means that there’s really no place here for Maggie to do anything.

I can’t stand passive heroines, and there I was in a corner with a heroine who had to be passive, at least for the first section of the book.  This was probably the biggest thing that got me stuck the first time I tried to write this book.  But, on about November 2nd, lightning inspiration hit me.  I’m frustrated by this–and Maggie can be frustrated too.  I don’t have to have a passive heroine–I can have an active heroine who’s being forced by circumstances to be passive, and she damn well doesn’t have to like it!

It was a really helpful breakthrough for the character, and for the feel of this part of the novel.  And I’ve come up with a few things Maggie can do or at least try to do, around the fringes of this focus-point conflict.

There are more plot holes farther down the line, both things don’t make sense and sections I just don’t know what to do with yet…but with any luck lightning will continue striking!  For tonight, here’s an excerpt.

           Maggie woke up the next morning to find that she was still here.  The idea was somehow even more oppressive the second day than it had been the first.  She lay in the ridiculously large bed, stared up at the canopy, and tried not to roll over onto her stomach and cry into the pillow.  If she managed to resist that impulse, then maybe she could muster enough will to get up.

            It might not have been as bad if she didn’t feel so aimless.  She wanted to do something, and she was at a loss to know what.  It was entirely possible that this current situation, exactly as it was, was going to go on for days or even weeks.  If the last two days were any indication, she could stay in this sort of limbo, not quite slipping into further hells, for the foreseeable future.  At least until Michael developed a stronger sense of self-preservation or, as seemed vastly more likely, King Maurus decided to stop being amused.

            So she had some space.  And it made her want to claw the walls that she couldn’t think of anything to do with it.  Escape plans and exploring were all well and good in theory and no doubt would be just the thing in a story, but the fact of the matter was she had no real direction and no clear ideas, and wandering around this castle, well…how likely was it really that she was going to find a secret tunnel, or a magic sword, or…anything, really.

            She had always been the instigator.  She had always been the one who made things happen if there wasn’t enough going on.  It was a byword in Beaumont, that she and Lina always got into some kind of enormous trouble in February.  One year it was nearly drowning trying to skate on a frozen pond; another year all the hunting dogs around the castle became decidedly drunk when their water was not-too-mysteriously spiked; and then there was the time she and Lina actually snuck along on a hunt and then got lost and…it was really just as well that no one knew about the time she’d dared Lina to climb out on the roof of the highest tower, and then of course she had to do it herself too.  If they had slipped, that would have been a story to top them all, one they probably wouldn’t have lived to tell.

            Things happened in February because winters were quiet and by February Maggie got tired of waiting for someone else to make things happen.

            Now here she was in the most awful February of them all, metaphorically speaking, and found her hands completely tied.  She wanted to do something besides stand there silently while King Maurus smirked and Michael went all noble.  She wished she knew how to do magic, or even how to fight.  Sure, one February she had tried to get one of the guards to teach her and Lina swordplay, but that had been stopped long before March.  A talent for instigating mischief seemed hardly likely to help her here.

            She didn’t cry, and she did eventually muster up the willpower to drag herself out of bed.  She pulled on the first dress her hand touched in the wardrobe, some frothy blue concoction, obviously not designed for anyone who actually did anything.  Fine.  It was perfectly suitable, then.

NaNoWriMo, Day 1: Launching!

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo6 Comments

Today has felt more like a holiday than yesterday did, and I think that’s down to the start of NaNoWriMo!  For those not familiar with it, that’s short for National Novel Writing Month, when lots of crazy people all over the world set a goal to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November.

I participated last year, and blogged throughout the month–just click the NaNoWriMo category to see my past posts.  This year I’m jumping in again, and so far I’m mostly in the first blush of excitement about it all.  We’ll see where I am in two weeks!

My plan this year is to try to do something with a novel that stalled out a few years back.  Here’s the description from my NaNo page:

The Monster and the Prince

Maggie only meant to pose as a princess for a few days–just long enough for the real princess to escape with the guardsman she loved, and avoid an arranged marriage to the King of Gaicaveene.  Maggie didn’t expect the king to be a magician, as cruel as he is powerful.  Confessing the lie is immediately out of the question, and so she finds herself trapped within the king’s castle, and her assumed identity.

Michael had meant to rescue a princess when he rode to the castle, only to discover that the princess was dead before he ever arrived.  Defeated in battle and under a curse, he’s trapped there with no way out and no purpose–at least until the “Princess Evangelina” arrives.

This may sound familiar to some of you, because I posted the first chapter some while back.  The trouble is, I only got about three chapters in last time I attempted this novel, before I got stuck in writer’s block and confronted with a lot of plot problems.  But I really liked those first three chapters, and I liked some of the concepts, I just couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work.

So–my hope is that the frenetic pace of NaNoWriMo will keep me moving forward, and that inspiration will strike when I need it.  As actually tends to happen at times.  It did last November, anyway. 🙂

And if it all flails and crashes and burns, I have a couple of short stories I’ve been wanting to write too.  So my goal is 50,000 words, and whether that’s the rest of this novel, or just a chunk of the novel and then a few short stories, either way I’m happy.

To start off, I woke up early this morning to write before work, then wrote again in the evening.  The daily goal is 1,667 words, and I have 2,781 so far–higher than I did the first day last year!  I really wanted to get a strong start, both for the psychological benefits, and because it means I can go out to my writing group tomorrow evening.  Perhaps it’s slightly counterintuitive to skip a writing group so that I can stay home and write…but it does take ALL evening.  Getting a headstart today means I (hopefully) can go out and not kill my word count tomorrow.  We’ll see! Continue reading “NaNoWriMo, Day 1: Launching!” →

NaNoWriMo Revisited

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo1 Comment

As you most likely know, I spent November working on a novel for NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month.  I finished the 50,000 word goal in November, but didn’t actually finish the novel.  So I set a new goal of 25,000 words in December, and promised to report back.

I ended up writing 26,000 words in December, finishing the goal and the novel on December 30th.  It actually was harder than the larger goal in November!  Part of that was holiday distractions; most of it was that I had blocked off November for novel-writing, and come December I had to catch up on other projects, splitting my time and attention.  I’m glad I did it this way, though.  If I had waited until, say, January to do another big push on the novel, I think I would have lost a lot of momentum.  As it was, I was able to keep going at a good rate (even if I was behind the word goal most of the month!) and use the long weekends around holidays at the end of the month to finish strong.

I really enjoyed writing a novel this quickly–it was more intense than my usual pace.  Also more exhausting!  But I got to know the characters in a different way.  I think there was less thought and more that was coming on instinct.  I guess I’ll see how that worked out when I do the revision…  I already know there are some big changes to make (like working in a character I didn’t realize needed to be there until 3/4 of the way through the book!) but I think it’s a decent first draft.

Before I revise The Twelve Dancing Princesses story (76,000 words, but I still don’t have a title…), I’m going to go back to my novel about a wandering adventurer (also title-less; it’s a problem) to do revision there.  For one thing, I need to bring some of the overlapping chapter into line with changes made while writing about the dancing princesses.

But that will probably wait until February.  If I don’t write I get depressed, so I don’t believe in fully taking time off.  However, I think I will take a month to recover from the fast pace of the last two months by doing some low-pressure writing.  I really enjoyed writing short stories for my storytelling character, so I may write more.  Or I may dip into some fanfiction, which is pretty much no-pressure, since I’m never going to publish it.

Anyway, it’s been a fun journey, and thanks for coming along.  🙂  I’ll probably share a few more excerpts from the NaNo novel for future Fiction Fridays, so stay tuned!

NaNoWriMo Day 30 and Victory!

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo5 Comments

I passed 50,000 words on my NaNo novel today, on the last day of November.  It was 50,070 according to NaNo’s word count validator, or 50,319 if you want to believe Microsoft Word.  Either way, pretty exciting!  After my big push a few days ago, I’ve been able to keep ahead of the goal, so I actually didn’t need to write too much on this last day–which made for a more relaxed end to the month.

Of course, it’s all rather artificial too–I’m already making plans for how I’m going to write 25,000 words in December, which should take me to the actual end of my first draft.  I’ve only just reached the final section; as I’ve mentioned, this story is actually a companion piece to my other main project right now, and I just introduced my main characters from that story into this one, literally in the last two paragraphs as I passed the 50,000 word goal.  So there are still fun writing times ahead!  And after this, writing only half as much each day should be easy…right?

Well, we’ll see!  I have to actually get back to the rest of my life now.  I kept up with my job and my social life in November, but anything else creative went on the backburner (any non-NaNo blog posts you read this month?  Wrote those in October).  There are penpals to email, blog posts to write, Challenge books to read, neglected blogs to follow…

But it’s definitely been worth it for the past month.  I have so enjoyed NaNo, and barring major life circumstance changes, I’m doing this again next year!  I loved the community aspect of it the most.  It was so much fun to know there were many other people writing this month too, and to interact with them on the NaNo forums.

And I loved spending so much time on my writing.  There were ups and downs to writing this quickly.  I don’t think I know Lyra and Dastan as well as I know, say, Julie and Jasper, who I’ve spent the last year and half with.  But by this point, I do know them, and I think I can work some of the thin bits out in the revision.  I found that I wrote much less description and with far less detail when I was writing quickly–another thing to deal with in revision.  But I also found out that I actually can keep coming up with plot and scenes, and that those lightning bolt moments of realization about how a story ought to go really will come when needed, even if I don’t give them a lot of time to arrive.  I think that by the time I finish this, it will be something of reasonable quality–but it’s going to need those revisions!

I’ll see where I am with my other writing projects by November of next year, but I might decide to do something unpublishable and therefore low-pressure: like a fanfiction novel, or a sequel to one of my other books.  Something that I’d write just for the fun of writing, but that I wouldn’t normally want to spend long lengths of time on (see above: unpublishable).  That would make it perfect for the whirlwind writing month of NaNo–I wouldn’t need to spend a lot of time, and I’d come in already knowing my characters.

But that’s a plan for next October.  For now, I am so glad I finally gave NaNo a go, and thank you all for coming along for the ride!

And now Lyra and Dastan are still awaiting their remaining 25,000 words…back to the trenches!