15 posts tagged “novel”

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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!

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. 

Nano_participant_icon_large

And my novel is about a quarter done.  Whew, how weird is that?  Am I about a quarter way through the story?  It is hard to tell since I have the outline in my word document and I’m basically writing where ever I want to within the outline.  I don’t know if that’s how anyone else does it, but that’s how I’m doing it.

My word count is 15,027 which is just a little bit ahead of schedule.  And I’m finding fiendish glee in being briefly ahead of some other folks on my buddy list who totally left me in the dust early on.  I hope to get back to the work tomorrow sometime, though I must admit, since I’m a little ahead and also getting pretty tired – I may take an evening off.  These late evenings make it hard to get up for work and I don’t want to wear myself out with this.  I must say though, seeing the word count go up is a pretty satisfying feeling.

Oh, and I decorated a wedding cake today.  I made it with hard drying icing that gets hard as a brick, and it is designed to be used as a display in the bakery.  I'm really delighted with how it turned out.  So I hope it goes over well with the customers - who knows, I could be doing alot of these.

Nano_participant_icon_large

It is 12:39 am on November the 7^th and I’m up to 12,144 words and my Word document is 32 pages long!  Yay!  Finally I made some progress on this.  I had started to feel dreadfully behind.  Now I’m actually a little ahead, or at least I was a half hour ago at midnight.  It’s a new day and I’ve got some sleeping to do.

My goal is about 50,000 words for two reasons – one (and most importantly) that’s what the NaNoWriMo.org website will accept as a “winner.”  And also, I’d like to be a very concise and to the point kind of writer.  I don’t want the novel to be ANY longer than it needs to be.  Shorter is always better. 

I have even tried my hand at 50 word stories.  It’s a challenge but a hugely satisfying one.  It’s just an interesting little exercise passed on by another writer friend.  Very interesting and you wouldn’t believe what al you ccan fit in a 50 word story.

Anyway, I had trouble last night with trying to write and then continually finding that I had fallen asleep in mid sentence.  I even once dozed off with my finger on the “e” and there was a long string of “eeeeeee’s” across my screen.  Tonight I came armed.  I sat down at my laptop with a saucer of potato chips.  Now we don’t usually have potato chips in the house at all, but each time I was fighting off sleep – another chip in my mouth would perk me up enough to finish a sentence or two.  It doesn’t change how tired I am, but it makes it possible for me to work through when I am this tired.  And that’s pretty cool.

It’s off to bed for me.  Nite nite foxy voxers and Sweet Dreams!

LOL, I'm so "show and telling!" 

Yeah, that first Christmas cake is actually a cardboard box iced with hard drying icing.  It's a display sample I made this week to prepare for the Christmas season at the bakery.  Yeah baby, move on over Martha! 

The grasshopper and lady bug are from two invitations for two children at the same party.  I was really happy with how cute that one turned out.

Then that crazy little wedding cake has a topper that is two frogs on a motorcycle.  What a riot!  Surrounded by the peach roses the whole thing turned out much better than I feared.  Until we got the roses on the thing it looked pretty stupid.  I carried that heavy little cake to the forth floor of L'Talia - VIA THE STAIRS!  All forty eleven million of them.  Pant pant!

Ok, better now.  Just had to prove that there is something in my life besides Nanowrimo.  Well, kinda anyway.  But my word count is 9274 at the moment and I'm hoping to top 10,000 today! 

Thank you foxy voxers!  

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.