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The World’s Tiniest NaNoWriMo

Last time I mentioned that I was going to attempt the “world’s tiniest NaNoWriMo”. I wrote it casually, offhandedly, to avoid the notice of the “No you can’t” voices. No, you’re too busy; you’re too stressed; the pandemic is still taking up too many brain cycles; you haven’t written any fiction since well before the pandemic began. That was all true…but I was determined to try. I picked a work in progress, a lighthearted fantasy novel that I had started for NaNoWriMo 2019. I’d written 20,000 words that November (an official NaNo is 50K words, and most novels are between 80K and 120K, depending on the genre). I’d written only a few thousand words on it since then, but I had an outline to guide me, and I thought I could manage to pick up from where I’d left off. I set the “tiniest possible goal”, 100 words a day, which has worked for me before when trying to restart the flow of creativity after a writing drought. (Those happen to me regularly.) Writing that slowly is not a great way to get a coherent story, especially novel length, but sometimes there’s nothing else to be done. Then I did the smartest thing: almost every evening I went and hung out with my online writer friends, and we challenged each other to “word wars”. You both start writing on your own projects at an agreed-upon time, and stop when the timer you’ve set goes off (usually 10 or 15 minutes,…

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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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Mardo estas esperanta tago (Tuesday is Esperanto Day)

So, September marked a full year since I took my first class in Esperanto. It also marked a full year since I met my study partner and continued studying with him after class ended. We began a series of video lessons from the 90s called Esperanto Pasporta al la Tuta Mondo (“Passport to the Entire World,” basically). It’s really cheesy, but it’s really great as far as the content for learning goes. There are also PDFs you can get that go with it — an entire transcript (which is so helpful), a vocab list, and excercises you can do as well. Quite a few of them! Let me tell you, this has been awesome for my learning. I’ve picked up so much, more than I probably would have with Duolingo alone. The excercises force you to use the concepts and actually solidify the ideas and grammar points in your mind. So it’s not just passive reading or watching, you’re doing it. And hell, the videos are cute — I often call it a soap opera because that’s what it reminds me of. Just with not-so-great acting. But the Esperanto is spot-on. At least from what I can tell, anyway. So my partner told me about a group in England that was having free classes in Esperanto. Beginner’s classes. At first I couldn’t make them. But this go around…I could make the Tuesday one. He talked me into the Course II – instead of Course I – because he felt that…

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Writing Again!

So a few days ago, I started writing again for the first time in SIX MONTHS. Yes, my friends, six months. It’s the longest time I ever went without writing since 2003, I estimate, because that’s when I started writing every day. I’ve had pockets of time where I stopped, or had to stop, like when I finished the revision of Fey Touched in 2012 and was brain dead for two months, or when the trigeminal neuralgia flared for the first time in my left eye and I quit the computer for three months, thinking it was my heavy computer usage (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). But never, ever have I went six months without a word of fiction. I have written poems here and there, so words were written — just not fiction words. Why on earth would I do such a thing, you ask? Why put myself through such torture? And yes, it was absolute torture. I don’t recommend it at all. There were a few things going on. One, I simply didn’t have the time. Sounds lame, because who doesn’t have time to write, but it’s absolutely true. With my health being sucky and my energy being low, and every minute I felt okay devoted to work, there just wasn’t any leftover spoons for writing — except poetry. I was battling a sleep disorder and head pain as well, so those things just made it worse. I was still stressed from the pandemic. Things are getting better overall,…

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Productivity! Or Not

Sorry I didn’t post this yesterday! I blame blood loss. (I gave blood, don’t panic.) They say that people who have more to do are more likely to get things done–the idea being that you expand your activities to the time available to you. If you only have one thing to do all day, you will do that one thing at the very last minute, and if you have 16 things to do, you will probably only get 10 done, but you’ll still have done 10 things. Something. I don’t know. I try to fill my days up with lots to do and it does work to some extent, but I find that it tends to be a few smaller things and maybe one bigger thing, and then, recently, the rest of my time has been taken up by Discord trivia. (There is Drama is the trivia world, which is ridiculous, but it goes to show that everything will eventually include drama.) Anyway, the drama is over, for the most part, but now I’m used to the trivia and whenever some starts a game, there I am. (I’m ranked 16th so far today, which is especially bad because I said I was going to stay off Discord this morning. And then didn’t.) Anyway, it’s a bit infuriating, because I’m not really making progress on more than one thing at a time. I had a word picked out for this year–Polish–where I was going to finish things I’d been working on…

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Looking Ahead and Behind

So, it’s 2020. A new year. A new decade. Let’s see what I was doing in 2010: ~I launched Turtleduck Press with Siri Paulson, KD Sarge, and Kit Campbell. With that launch, I published my first poetry chapbook, Life as a Moving Target. It was my first publication, apart from poetry in literary magazines, ever. ~I had entered into my nth draft of Pirouette (now titled Death Dancer), hoping that this time it will be ready for a literary agent. This is before self publishing took over, and I ended up setting it aside on the advice of my writer friends who felt I was too wrapped up in revisions. I ended up writing Fey Touched instead (and published that in 2012).~I started writing an odd, supernatural thriller thing that to this day is still waiting to be finished. I’m close. It is important because of how the idea came to me, and how the story has warped and changed over time. It is also a new genre that’s a bit out of my comfort zone, but that’s a good thing.~I had been married for one year, yay! And we’re still going strong. ~I had three foot surgeries, the most recent this past March. I am hoping that’s the end of ALL surgeries for awhile. So, pretty major stuff going on. In the decade, I’d release another poetry chapbook, four novels, a novelette, a flash fiction collection, and a nonfiction book. Unfortunately, none of it is Pirouette or the supernatural…

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A Theme for the Year

Happy 2020, friends. I hope the new year (I’m one of those no-year-zero people, so I won’t say new decade yet) is treating you well, and you’re making lovely progress on all your goals and resolutions. I got a bit of a late start, but I’m off and running now. I’ve written two short stories and am in the final edits on a nonfiction book in the last week, so hooray! Themes seem to be the trend this year, and I picked mine back in December: education. What does that mean? It means focusing on learning new things and practicing things I’m less confident of, mostly in terms of writing and drawing. To that end I’m taking an illustration class a month over at SkillShare and reading through my stash of writing books which have been collecting dust. And it means focusing on writing/drawing for the sake of writing/drawing, not always being so focused on marketing and publishing and submitting and all that jazz. Even just making that decision has been freeing. I’m feeling really good about everything. So, for this month, I’m reading The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig (man, some of the analogies he comes up with…) and taking a class on sketch journaling. I did a practice page last night, using my drawing pens and watercolor, and I’m really pleased with how it came out. On the writing just for writing front, I decided I’m going to use up some of the pins I’ve been pinning for…

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Is it Nano if There are not Dinosaurs?

Happy November, friends! ‘Round these here parts, it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which I am doing for the first time in five years. The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month. (I’m at 19,000 as of yesterday.) The idea behind Nano is that, instead of letting yourself get bogged down in worries about the quality of your writing, you focus on quantity, and, in theory, unleash your inner creativity that would never come out under normal circumstances. I love Nano, but Nano is not always the right solution for where I currently am in my writing career. But when they do line up–why not go in, feet first, with all the reckless abandon I can manage? The story I’m working on this year is one that I had a vague idea for that never gelled. So I stole it and stuck it in Hidden Worlds. Then, of course, after Hidden Worlds was published and released into the wild, the story gelled. About five years ago, I did a ton of research for the story and wrote the first chapter. And then I put it away, to be worked on when I got around to it. Well, I’ve gotten around to it. The story is a kind-of Odyssey-ish voyage across an ocean, focusing on themes of redemption, knowing and trusting yourself, and discovering your worth. Which is all lovely. Sounds like I know what I’m doing, doesn’t it? But it also gives me leave to make a bunch…

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Outwitting the Inner Critic

If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll know that the Inner Critic is my worst enemy as a writer. That’s the little voice in your head that says “This story is so derivative, the dialogue is wooden, your characters have no personality, and you don’t write enough to be a Real Writer anyway.” (Your mileage may vary.) Periodically I find a way to fight it. Then I forget what I did that worked. So here’s my latest attempt to write down what worked in hopes of cementing it into my brain (or at least referring to it next time I need it). And if it helps you too, so much the better… Some context: Last month, I went off on a week-long writing retreat and took some short stories that I wanted to revise. Normally, for me, revising is a great way to get the Inner Critic to come out and play, I mean stomp all over me. (Ironic for someone whose day job is actually editing, but there you go.) I can write first drafts (sometimes) and I can tinker with line edits (usually). But if a story needs anything bigger, I just…freeze up and have no idea where to start, or else write endless brainstorming notes and never get any closer to having a reshaped story that I’m happy with. This time, neither of those things happened. Here’s what I did. Start sessions with handwriting. I brought along a book of writing exercises/prompts and had them…

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The Art of Finishing

They say the hardest part of finishing a story is getting to The End. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but there’s a lot of “The End”s to get through in the creation of a story. In some ways it feels like it never ends. First you have to finish the draft. Then you have to finish the revision process, then work on publication and all that entails–covers, descriptions and marketing, and the marketing never really ends, does it? Book after book, all it gives you is more to keep an eye on, more upkeep to do. It can a bit exhausting, not going to lie. And a little depressing at times, when you look at everything you need to do. And I think that’s why writers tend to…not finish. Why we’re always picking up new projects when old ones aren’t done, or trying to squeeze one more thing in that we just don’t have time for. There’s something in the act of creation that, even if it’s not going well, is freeing. A story, when it’s still in its nebulous phase, can be anything, is full of potential. Reality hasn’t caught up to it yet. It’s a balancing act, I think, the creation and the rest of it. And if you get out of balance, it’s hard to see any real progress. So, I guess my point is to make sure you call still see the forest for the trees, and that you’re having some fun somewhere, writing or otherwise. Or…

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