Category: NaNoWriMo

Happy Halloween – and on to the Writing!

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo1 Comment

Halloween almost entirely snuck up on me this year, and if I didn’t happen to have a collection of masks, I wouldn’t have anything to wear to my office Halloween party today.  I’ve been rather more focused on tomorrow–November 1st, and the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, known to its friends as NaNoWriMo.

This will be my fifth year of NaNoWriMo, when lots of writers all over the world set themselves a goal to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November.  I’ve hit my word count each year (with some variations in what exactly I’ve been working on), and two of my published novels began as NaNo projects.

Mostly, I’ve started a new novel each NaNo, written the bulk of it in November and finished in December.  This year I have different plans.  Continue reading “Happy Halloween – and on to the Writing!” →

NaNoWriMo Day Infinity…

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo1 Comment

What with Christmas and end-of-the-year posts, I got very distracted from sharing about my NaNo novel!  I was working towards a half-NaNo (25,000 words) during December, but happily, I finished ahead of time.  I got to 65,882 words and the end of the story on December 20th!

There will definitely be revision needed, thematically and on some POV issues I’ve mentioned earlier, but overall I’m pretty happy with how the first draft turned out.  Since it’s shorter than most of my first drafts, there’s plenty of space for expansion.  And considering this is a very complicated plot involving alien fairy tales, a conspiracy theory, a millennia-old treasure hunt and, of course, parallel universes, I’m happy to have managed a mostly coherent first draft in the frantic rush of NaNo.  Writing to the end helped me figure a lot out, and give me a better idea of the direction to take when I revise.

But that won’t be for a while.  I plan to let this one percolate in my backbrain for at least several months, maybe a year, while I focus on last year’s NaNo novel, book 4 in my Beyond the Tales series.  So it’ll be some time before this one pops up again.  But have a last excerpt in the meantime. 🙂

        I turned to go, and maybe I really would have gone—or maybe I would have walked five steps and turned around again—but it didn’t matter because when I turned to go, rather too fast and without looking around, I collided right into someone carrying a big lot of groceries, disrupted the antigrav field holding everything together, and sent a whole pile of food flying all over the walkway.

            “Oh—sorry!” I said, stooping down to catch some kind of wildly rolling fruit.

            “No, I wasn’t looking where I was going either.”

            My breath caught and I looked up, fruit in one hand but letting another piece go right by me.

            Of course it was Lark. Her hair was a little bit longer and I had somehow, irrationally, expected her to be wearing her blue coat, which she wasn’t, but it was still definitely, unmistakably Lark, briskly and cheerfully tossing groceries back into the antigrav net.

            “I’m sorry,” I said again. For a lot of things.

            “No harm done,” she said, tossing one last loaf of bread back into the hovering pile and standing up. She flashed me a grin, a familiar grin that made my chest hurt. “I’m Lark, I live here,” she said with a nod towards the house. I managed not to say I knew that. “Are you new to the neighborhood?”

            Because of course she’d introduce herself to any new neighbors. She was like that. “No,” I said, regretting it. “I’m—my family, we’re startraders. Our ship is—in port.” Or in orbit. I had no idea, but it probably didn’t matter. Then I started slightly, realizing what I hadn’t said, overlooking the obvious thing that she still didn’t know. “I’m Aza.”

December NaNo Update

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo, Ruminations2 Comments

As I mentioned in my NaNoWriMo wrap-up post, I am spending December continuing to write my NaNo novel.  My goal is to write 834 words a day (for a 25,000 word total month).  After official NaNo, this feels much, much easier!  And that’s a good thing because I’ve been sick a couple times and slipped behind on my goal–although right now I’m just about on track.

I’m also not too worried about the possibility of getting behind because I really don’t think the novel is going to take a full 25,000 words to finish.  I’ve done a little over 8,000 words so far this month, and I’d be surprised if it takes a full 10,000 more to finish.  Although it could happen!  Stories do often surprise me…

I realized somewhere near the end of NaNo that this story is bigger and more complex and frankly beyond the scope of what I’m achieving in this first draft–so at this point I almost feel like I’m writing an extremely detailed outline which will be changing and expanding as I revise.  I’m rather looking forward to finishing this draft and letting it percolate in my backbrain while I go on to another project.  And I am figuring out some things in the process of this writing, so it feels worth it to finish the outline-ish draft.

And it means I can give you another excerpt!

Aza rubbed her hands together, then pressed one palm against a blank space between the handprints.

Immediately the sound of rock sliding over rock filled the cavern. Aza and I looked at each other with mirrored excitement, looked towards the ravine blocking our path—and realized that the ledge we were standing on had just shrunk significantly.

“Maybe that wasn’t the right spot?” Aza said just above a whisper.

“Just how angry was this woman?” I demanded, staring at the now much closer ravine. “It was not enough to scatter clues across the entire galaxy, she had to put death traps in the final approach?”

NaNoWriMo Day 18: Resurfacing and Still Writing

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo1 Comment

It’s been a while since my last NaNo update!  I’ve been out of town for several days on a trip to Disneyland–which was excellent, but not the best timing for NaNo.  However, because traveling with a writing friend is awesome, I did some writing on the trip and stayed on track for my word count despite the distractions of cool things like Pirates of the Caribbean and the Peter Pan ride–is anyone surprised those are two of my favorites? 🙂

I just passed 30,000 words today, keeping me still on target.  Plot-wise I think we’re going ahead pretty well too, though it’s always hard to tell.  I’m having something of a POV crisis, as about 25,000 words in Aza suddenly decided she wanted to tell a scene in her POV, and then 4,000 words later decided her next scene ought to be in first person after all, thanks.  So I’m just running with it…and will figure this out in revisions!

Have an excerpt!  The Boreans are an unusual species in that they are far more sensitive to light than most sentient species, but have excellent night vision.  So they’re completely nocturnal, creating some…differences in their mythology.  Here Aza is describing the story behind one of their constellations.

“The Boreans have a constellation called the Lightslayer,” I explained. “There was a valley trapped in perpetual daylight, and this one soldier ventured into the brightness and told stories to the glowing dragon guarding the valley and keeping it in daylight. The stories finally put the dragon to sleep and the soldier could kill it and bring the darkness back. But the light had got into his body too, and no one could look on him without being pained by his brilliance. So the gods took pity and placed him in the sky, where his brightness was too far away to hurt anyone, and he could stand as a guardian of the night.

NaNoWriMo Day 8: I Have No Clever Title Today

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo4 Comments

We are just past the one week mark on NaNoWriMo…and I’m going to blame my utter inability to think of  title for this post on the NaNo novel taking all my creative energy (incidentally, it has no clever title yet either…)

But all that creative energy is going good places!  I was knocking along pretty close to the word count goal as of Friday night.  Then yesterday was Double-Up Day in the NaNo world–the official goal was either double your total word count, or double your daily word count.  I luckily (seriously, unplanned) had the day marked off for pretty much nothing but writing (and meeting a writing friend to write and discuss story ideas–so helpful, I recommend it).  SO…I successfully doubled my average-to-date daily word count yesterday for a grand 3,450 words on Saturday.  And today I’ve managed another 2,800. 🙂

Since I will be out of town all next weekend (not so good planning), this is not only good, but probably extremely necessary…

But word count aside, how are things going?  Well, I still have no idea how long this will ultimately be, I’m infodumping quite a lot, and I’m having a little trouble getting a read on Leilathya, my POV character (she’s more enthusiastic than I expected)…but I’m just running with it!  We’re moving forward in the plot–Leilathya and Aza have so far bounced into two alternate universes, and I think my next scene will probably reveal just what Aza’s looking for.  Which is exciting!  And even if I have to smooth out or make consistent the characters later, it’s all part of the process of figuring out who they are, so it’s all good.

And I do feel that something must be going right if I’m in a place where I can write the line, “calm down and stop turning green,” and it’s not even metaphorical or exaggerated.  On that note, have an excerpt. 🙂

“Oh, that’s funny.”

“What is?” I asked, quite sure that there had not been any recent jokes.

“The chronometer,” Aza said, jerking her chin toward some of the numbers on one display panel. “That’s not what time it is at home right now.”

I stared at the numbers, even though they didn’t mean anything to me. “But that’s not possible. We can’t have traveled time. Time travel is completely, mathematically, proven to be—”

“Calm down and stop turning green,” Aza said, “it’s just the local ship time. We reset it if we’re on a planet long enough for it to make sense. That’s a good sign, that must mean things are more different in this universe, if something made Mum give the order to change the clocks.”