I sat down with my copy of “Broken Time” at about 3:45 or so this afternoon and didn’t come up for air until 9:30 this evening.  The writing style is a breeze and goes by so fast it will leave you wanting more.

Broken Time

Set in an underground world of labyrinth corridors, bunkers, artificial lighting and Big Brother style oversight, the parents of a small ill boy battle their way to each other and to wholeness.  Doctors seek to balance discovery with personal sacrifice and come up wanting more than science can offer.  Nearly every page holds a complex melding of sci-fi biology, and super calculating systems of both biological and technological origin.  And yet the text manages to be human, warm and intriguing, even compassionate.   

The story is a truly creative look at the space between life and death and the question of wholeness and identity.  Complex themes of love and loss are interwoven with strong maternal instincts and grace.  All in all an excellent read, and the most creative tale I’ve seen in ages.  Bravo!

Here is the book’s description:

A dangerous new virus is spreading across the globe, Emergent Atoximia (EA). When an unemployed widower, Henry Poems, son Buddy is diagnosed with the new disease, his world collapses. Henry painfully watches his options disappear and knows there is only one chance left to save his son. He will trade five years of his life to the Burkette Group in exchange for the promised cure. The trade seems like a bargain until the Deep Sleep Statsis program, run by a one of a kind organic super computer named MARI, starts to develop a few glitches, plunging Henry into a world of trapped souls. Forced to navigate the endless hallways of a surreal landscape, Henry encounters a diverse group of characters that try to help him understand his connection with MARI while reintroducing him to missing parts of his own identity. On the outside, a desperate race for a cure is coming to a surprising conclusion as Dr. Alcorn begins to suspect that EA may have gone self-aware.

More info here:    http://www.lulu.com/browse/book_view.php?fCID=2350732&fContestID=1&submit=%3C%3C+Back+to+Content  This is the hardback version, a paperback version is available and also an e-book.

I should also mention that Tony wrote this book during the first fifteen days of Nanowrimo last November.  And to create this whole world (rough draft) and cast of complex characters in FIFTEEN DAYS has really completely blown me away!  And I am mentioned in the “author’s note” page.  J  Which I’ve mentioned before, but it bears repeating.  I am so proud of him I could just burst!

Send to a friend

I am SO excited!  I hold in my hand… *expectant hush* the fruit of a friend’s hard labor.  Last November I challenged a friend to write a novel with me for Nanowrimo.  He wrote an over 60,000 word novel, but instead of taking the whole 30 days of November, he wrote it in just 15 days!!  Yeah, is that amazing or what?!  And I’m holding the finished printed hard bound novel in my hands right now!  It just came! 

Broken Time

And guess what?!  My name is mentioned in the “Author’s Note!”  *does a little dance!*  And I quote:  “I was challenged to write a novel in the month of November by a wonderful and encouraging friend, Carmen.”  Yeah!  That’s me!  Wonderful and encouraging – LOL!  “I took the challenge, and what was birthed during that first 15 days of the month and this is the novel that follows.”

Wonderful and encouraging me

Tony Vilgiate

He’s sent me excerpts here and there along the way that I gobbled up with delight, so I’m really looking forward to taking some time to sit in my spot on the sofa and devour this thing, hook line and sinker.  I got the bits before he sent it off to be edited, and the editor took out 9000 words, so I hope it’s still as cool as it was before the editing.  I can hardly wait!  As a matter of fact, that may become my project for the day if I can tear myself away from the pressing stuff. 

Here’s the info:

Book:  Broken Time

Author: Anthony Vilgiate

Hard bound, 419 pages

Buy it at Lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/content/2350732  

I’ll post a review once I’ve had a chance to uh… well… review it.  yeah.

Send to a friend

Well, I’ve blown off church again.  As I was waking up I could feel the pain in my body so I got up long enough to take a pain killer, eat a roll and crawl back into bed.  I figured if I was feeling better when I woke up – I’d take a bath and then head off to church.  Well, I woke up at 9:55 when one of my dogs decided to have a nice bark.  And church starts at 10:00.  Tsk tsk, I missed it.  Hubby will be annoyed with me, but hey, he missed it also.  Because he’s working.  I just missed it because I’m… uh… well… 

I’m half way through my NaNoWriMo project.  I was ahead most of the time, keeping up with my daily word count and such.  Then everything kind of hit at once, the dealy with the neighbor’s dog, the visit of the inlaws, Misde’s seizures and then working really long hours at work.  I didn’t add a single word to my total in about a week and a half and got about 15,000 words in the hole.  Crap!  Hard to come back from that.  So anyway, my response has been to write something – even though it’s more like a journal entry at the end of the manuscript – just to see the word count go up.  I don’t know if I’ll keep it in edit or what, but at this point, it’s at least a documentation of how I’m feeling about my life at the moment.  Yeah, my life is in this crappy stuck horrible place.  I hate it.  Blah!  Me and my brick wall.  May the Lord have mercy on my soul.

I guess I’ll try and see if I can bang out the remaining 25,000 words to reach the nano finish line this week.  I’m not going to work endless hours into the night on it, I just don’t think I want it that much.  I don’t know that all these words will make it through the final cut to become part of the novel – but it’s words.  And it’s first draft, so it’s ok.  And right now, absent a great passion for the work and motivation… well, that will just have to do for now.  Maybe one day when I DON'T think my life is completely stuck, I’ll come back to it and work till it all sorts itself out. 

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Well, what an adventure!  I scrapped my NaNo this morning and started over.  And I worked on it starting at about noon and it’s nearly 1 am, so I’ve been at this for about twelve hours or so.  I did take frequent breaks, pausing to drive to a friend’s house to see if I could get her cat to come out – I couldn’t.  I'm "kitty sitting for a friend but her cat won't leave the house so it is an exercise in futility.  And I took a break to watch Extreme Home Makeover and that PBS drama about the Amazing Mrs. Pritchard.  Hubby went to bed and I turned off the tv and I got back to work. 

At 5:00 I had 6811 words

At 7:00 - 8197

(I set it aside to watch tv for a while.)

At 10:00 - 8235

At 11:00 - 12511

At midnight I had 12946

And now I have 18492.

Most of the time since 10:00 pm has been mining passages from the first manuscript for the new outline.  It makes more sense the way I have it organized at the moment and I can sort out the rest of the organization issues in the next draft.  Ha Ha!  I feel a very renewed interest in this work and clarity about what all needs to be written yet.  I'm hoping to get seriously ahead of the curve tomorrow because this weekend is going to be a complete wash.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Ok, this has been a very unusual Sunday at my house.  I skipped church.  I know I know – sue me.  And then I scrapped my NaNoWriMo project.  But I slept late and got up while hubby was preparing for work.  He made the two of us a nice breakfast and off he went.  I brushed my hair and washed my face and headed for the laptop computer to see what could be done about my NaNo.  I sat looking over the pages from the previous days and my 16,094 word count and pretty much found it an annoying disorganized mess.  So after trying unsuccessfully to categorize and separate out the different kinds of writing, I gave up.  I had some sections of the novel written as a journal, some were memories of an earlier time and some were straight narration.  Well, it was confusing crap.  So I started over with a blank word document and set my word count on the NaNoWriMo.org website back to zero.  (gulp!) 

I started in with a new vision and wrote for a while.  After a while I’d get to a point where I remembered something I had written in the first draft and so I’d go cut and paste it into the new document.  It was kind of an interesting process. 

At 12:30 pm I had zero words

1:00 – 618 words

2:00 - 3102 words

3:00 - 4478 words

4:00 - 5429 words

And at 5:00 I had 6811 words.

Now THAT was FUN!

I’m taking a break fairly often and since the dogs keep wanting to be let out and then let in – I’m interrupted often but I think that might actually be good for me, who knows.  So, I’ll see how far I can get for a while and then lay it down until tomorrow.  If I get really frustrated with my word count I’ll just go word mining in the old document and cut and paste a really big chunk.  But at the moment the story line still kinda makes sense and I’d like to keep it that way.  I guess that's the tension between simply writing first draft and allowing it to be what it is (crap) or going back in and messing around with the stuff that has already been written.  Anyway, I'm feeling better about the project and as far as I'm concerned - that is the point.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Nano_participant_icon_large

And it felt gooooood!  It’s official.  I’m starting over.  About 16,000 words in and I’m not seeing how to get to 50,000 from here, so I’ve set it aside.  Well, I’ve only set aside the original document but not the original idea. 

After some serious consideration this morning I believe I have hit on a new vision of this idea that will take this project home.  And it is more than a “mid course correction.”  First, it wasn’t mid course – only about a quarter of the way in.  And secondly, it’s not a correction – it’s more of a complete overhaul. 

So I’m starting with a clean word document, and a whole new vision of the big picture for this project.  I hate disorganization and so far it was just feeling like bits and pieces that were all over the charts and I wasn’t feeling the direction.  I will use the original document as a resource to work on the second.  I will do plenty of cutting and pasting I’m sure.  So all is not lost – only reorganized.  I'm going to set my NaNoWriMo word count back down to zero.  (Uh, gasp!)  And once I get on my way, and start plugging in the bits and pieces I already have – the word count should jump nicely from time to time. 

Renewed hope and energy for the project.  A little less frustration.  I don’t like to spend my energy on things that have lost the inspiration and gotten more into the category of “I Should…”  The “shoulds” are never enough reason to do anything, they are just heavy burdens to add to the rest that I already carry.  And reading around through some of what my writer friends are going through made it clear to me that I’m not alone in that feeling.  So anyway, here’s to try number two (or forty as the case may be.) 

And I LOVE Sue Grafton and loved reading her pep talk just now!  Great stuff!  And great advice also!  Very cool lady and I have enjoyed lots of her books! 

So I'll raise my glass to Ms. Grafton, writing a novel, and to new beginnings.  CHEERS!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

The nanowrimo wagon.  I have not written anything on my novel since Thursday.  I was a little ahead at that point so it wasn’t a big hairy deal but my head is seriously out of the game.  If I don’t write anything today then I’ll officially be behind on my word count at midnight tonight.  I can really sink myself back into it over the weekend I hope, but then work gets increasingly hairy as we close in on the weekend and my in-laws are coming to town which means less time to breathe because the house needs to be put in order, great food made and so forth and so on.  There should be a law against in-laws coming to my house when I’m in the middle of something – but I’m always in the middle of something and their timing sucks.  They are good people, they just manage to get on my nerves anyway.  Oh well, tonight, tomorrow and Monday I really hope to do some serious catching up.  A friend of mine (user ID Vilgiate) is at 29,722 words!  Yeah, can you believe that?  I’m hoping to catch up soon. 

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Nano_participant_icon_large

It is November 4^th - well - not really anymore.  My clock says 12:03.  I wrote nothing whatsoever on day three.  I even got off work at around 3 pm, but then one of my clients that I design jewelry for showed up and blah, blah, blah, my time was pretty well shot.  I came home so sick of conversation that I planted the posterior on the couch all evening in front of a Jules Vern movie that turned out to be THREE HOURS LONG!  The very nerve!  So by the end of that I was pretty much toast.

7848 words.

Toward my goal of about 50,000 words.

It had started to look a bit like a crazy quilt so today I spent an inordinate amount of time on plot planning, trying to gauge the arc of the story so it all pretty much hits the fan with a big, uh… well, fantastically.  Sorry for the pun.  It’s not the kind of thing that really pumps up the word count.  But at least I didn’t delete the whole chunks that I think really are garbage.  Who knows, they may come in handy later on.  One can hope anyway. 

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Ok, I’m flummoxed!  I’d like to find my IRL friend on the nanowrimo site, but the search the author function is down and it just seems to me that there should still be a way to find him on there somehow.  Anyone have any ideas?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Nano_participant_icon_large

Well, I haven’t written anything on my writing project yet today.  I’m struggling to call it a novel really – just seems like chunk of text to me for now. 

I went to work a little earlier than usual this morning and then delivered a wedding cake that I decorated to the FOURTH floor of L’Talia.  Yeah, I carried that heavy thing up stairs and more stairs.  And then a few more even.  Then I went off to my studio to meet a client so she could pick up the jewelry I’d designed for her.  She stayed and talked to me for a very very long time so I was there two hours with her.  At first it was fine but after a while I started to get tired then I just wanted her to stop talking long enough that I could say bye and shut the door.  Oh well, I really do like the lady, and she is a very good customer, but I was really getting tired.  She has some great jewelry!

6394 words

Toward my goal of about 50,000 words.

I’m frustrated (again) with the nanowrimo website.  I guess that’s old news but good grief!  It is supposed to get better.  I hope soon.

But there is something I’ve been thinking about.  In one section of text I referred to something that happened in the past and then realized it would contribute to the overall building of tension in the story if I wrote it into the narrative of the story.  Which leads me to consider completely rewriting a whole section of the story.  So, how does that work with the whole “first draft” part of Nanowrimo?  I could write it over and keep both the first idea and the second in there… and later if I’m well over the word count, then I can cut it and it won’t matter.  But if I’m short on words it will matter if I start killing whole sections of the book to write them another way.  I will rewrite it, but I’ll admit that when it comes time to select the old text and hit the delete button – it may give me pause.    

Read and post comments | Send to a friend