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Tag: writing challenges

NaNoWriMo, So Good to Me

Fifteen years ago, I did NaNoWriMo for the first time. In twenty-four days, I wrote the first draft of Even the Score. I won. In 2007, I pulled the mess that was what I had of Joss together, and wrote the first real draft of Queen’s Man. 2008 was Burning Bright. I wrote the 50k, but the book wasn’t done. I got stuck. The next year when NaNo was approaching, I thought I’d go ahead and finish it for NaNo. Instead I got inspired and I wrote the ending in NaNoPubYe’s NaNo warm-up (25k in two weeks) and ended up doing In the Forests of the Night for NaNo 2009. I wrote over 50,000 words in fifteen days. Two days later, I’d written the entire first draft. My streak of useable first drafts ended there, alas. I won 2010 with 50,000 words of my nemesis story, but I still, eleven years later, don’t have a plot. (the plot? I have lots of…things.) NaNo hasn’t only given me the impetus to write and finish a bunch of novels (Is four a bunch?) It has given me friends. I met my dear friend, my roomie, through NaNo. I met a bunch of other writing friends, with whom I still write, on the NaNo forums, or in my favorite writing forum that grew from the NaNo forums. And, of course, most important to my writing destiny, I met Siri, Erin, and Kit through that forum. We’ve been writing and publishing together for eleven…

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Imagination. It’s Great!

One night when I was somewhere around seventeen, I was visiting my best friend. I was friendly with her mom (who shared my love of Guns’n’Roses, which best friend decidedly did not) so when best friend wanted to go to bed, I hung around in the living room talking to mom for a few minutes before heading home. The big old console TV (remember those?) was showing one of the Critters movies. I was, as I said, around seventeen. But home was a half mile away, and it was a dark (but moonlit!) night. And I lived in the country, did I mention that? It was an empty half mile, with no streetlights, no houses, and probably not a single car passing me. And there were dark patches on the road. Yes, I knew they were spots where the gray asphalt, sparkling a bit with mica chips, had been patched with tar. I’d seen them on the walk to best friend’s house. I’d seen them, walked over them, ridden my bike past them, probably a thousand times. I knew exactly what they were, and I bet I could have mapped them with my eyes closed. That night while I told myself exactly what those dark patches were, I walked wide around them anyway, keeping an eye on them even once I was past, in case one of them tried to come after me. More than being scared, though, I was annoyed. Let’s face it, even in the 80’s, these weren’t…

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Searching for Consistency in Chaos

Yeah, that’s basically been my life for…gosh…since August of last year? Not counting COVID, just business stuff, now. Somehow the editing part of my business exploded and I started getting jobs way more frequently than usual…one after the other. While this was totally awesome and lucrative, it required some adjusting — from the way I structured my workday to the way I scheduled each and every job. And, for the most part, it hasn’t really let up since. Which is awesome. And a bit rough. And then we also have COVID in there, and the usual life stuff, and my health crap and and and… So things have been seriously off kilter for awhile. So much that I haven’t written in months. One of my editing clients, who I routinely talk shop with, asked me the other day how the writing was coming along and I had to honestly tell him that I’d written 181 words in January and that was it for the year so far. And some poetry. And in years past I’d written every single day. My least prolific year back then was around 86,000 words, back when I spent a bit more time editing than drafting. My most prolific year? 399,000 words. Four standard novels, folks. But back then I had 9-to-5 day job. I came home, ate dinner, and wrote. Rinse and repeat. For years. It was not only a routine, but a comfort. I knew I could always go into my worlds and play.…

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Defunct Writing Challenges

You know what’s interesting? The way March seems to be embedded in the online writing community’s consciousness as a month for revision. This is because there was NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month) once upon a time. All versions of EdMo I can find are defunct, with 2019 being the most recent any seem to be active, but even before that, it wasn’t that big. Yet, it has stuck, and it seems like almost every writing community I’ve ever belonged to turns to revision in March. I don’t really have a point, it’s just interesting to me. How pervasive the challenge was for not really ever being that big of a deal. Writing challenges come and go, and even ones that stick around change over time. The NaNoWriMo that exists today is very different from the one I did back in 2003. Adapt or die, I guess. As for me, I never seem to be on revision or editing in March, and I’ve certainly have never been able to finish an entire revision in a month. Man, that’s the dream. It is interesting to me, the way challenges age or don’t. They either get more people every year or dwindle down until they die, or sometimes the people running them don’t feel like doing it any more, or sometimes something bigger or shinier comes along and overshadows them. I still don’t have a point, except perhaps that I like writing challenges–the idea that doing something as a group makes you more…

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