Month: November 2011

Siri here. I’m very pleased to introduce our guest blogger for today, Nancy Kelley. Nancy is a friendly Tweeter, a hardworking writer, and an indie author with a twist. Here she is to explain… — I write Jane Austen sequels. My new book, His Good Opinion, is Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy’s point of view. The novel I wrote this year during National Novel Writing Month is a sequel to P&P, focusing on Colonel Fitzwilliam and Georgiana Darcy. I have two additional Austen novels turning over in the back of my mind, waiting for their turn. A humorous conversation plays out many times when I tell people I’m an author. “Oh really! What’s your book called?” “His Good Opinion. It’s a Pride and Prejudice sequel.” (Long pause, often accompanied by a blank look) “Oh. People do that?”    

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We’re pretty excited around here about our anthology Winter’s Night. This blog will be pretty short because we’re still working on it, making it awesomer! It amuses me because when we talked about doing an anthology, I mentioned that the story I had in mind was Christmas-related, but I hoped the whole collection wouldn’t be. I needn’t have worried. Winter’s Night has a Christmas story. It has a fairy tale. It has a rondeau, as well as two other poems. It has a story set in Inuit mythology. Turtleduckers…what can I say? We don’t do anything the traditional way. I hope you’ll check out Winter’s Night on December 1st. A percentage of our profits will be donated to UNICEF.

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Any writer will tell you that there’s no shortage of ideas out there.  Book ideas lurk around every corner, waiting to pounce.  Short story ideas hide under your bed, ready to grab you by the ankle.  There is no avoiding them. However, sometimes you are approached for something specific, and while you may have more ideas than you know what to with, you may not have anything ready to go.  

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  At this time of year, the blogosphere is full of chatter about NaNoWriMo. Many writers love it. Other writers hate it. (Full disclosure: I fall into the former camp. This will be my seventh NaNo.) But what if you fall in between? What if you like the idea but you know there’s no way you can hit 50,000 words on a new novel in November? Here are some suggestions that might help, from least to most radical… 1. Do NaNo in another month. If you want to try a writing challenge but November is just a bad month, you have options! This year, the NaNoWriMo people put on Camp NaNoWriMo in the summer. They also do a screenwriting challenge, Script Frenzy. Other challenges have sprung up using the same model – NaNo-style challenges in most other months, National Novel Editing Month, National Novel Writing Year, and so on. Pick the one that works for you.

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