The Short and the Long of It

Short Fiction - 0
Long Fiction - 3548
Poetry - 187
Total Words - 3735
Editing Hours - 0
Paragraphs of Notes - 3

The short version is that I missed my wordage goal by about 1500 words but I’m going to be doing NaNo anyway.

The long version is...I don’t know what I was doing last week, but apparently it wasn’t writing. The words are there, I can feel them, and I know pretty much what’s going to happen between now and the end of the book, but knowing and doing are two very different things.

And that’s when it hit me. Every year I go through a writing slump in the weeks leading up to NaNo. The closer I get to November 1, the less I write. It’s almost like my brain is saving up the words to spew them forth in November.

Decision made, I picked my novel and even came up with a working cover for it (to go with the working title).

The story is actually the sequel to my first NaNo novel, which was an utter failure (although it did spawn ideas for two sequels and one prequel). The book was finished at 35,000 words with a week of NaNo left to go. It being my first book and all, I had no clue what I could do to make it longer. Who knows, maybe it doesn’t need to be any longer - as I recall it was pretty action packed.

I’m probably setting myself up for failure, but the lure of NaNo is too strong to resist. This doesn’t mean I’ll be giving up on Wandering Wizards, I’ll be working on both novels at the same time. You know, just to make things interesting.

Think it can’t be done? Never under estimate the power of determination. I know people who’ve done twice and even three times the required 50,000 words in the month of November. I even know people who’ve knocked off their 50,000 in the first week. I’m pretty sure they lived alone and were fed intravenously, but they did it.

At least my office will be more or less back together by then. We got the futon dismantled and stashed away (you can read more about that HERE if you like) over the weekend and the hubby made the inserts for the upper desk drawers. I need to clean the carpet and shuffle the furniture around, but the desk itself is where I want it to be and I can plug away at the rest as time permits.

So this week the focus will be both working on getting my office set up and getting as many words in on Wandering Wizards as I can manage.

Oh! And since my inbox hasn’t exactly been flooded with stories, poems, and articles inspired by my picture prompt, guess I’d better get on something for that too, eh?

A writer’s work is never done. ;-)

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to No Schedule

Short Fiction - 495
Long Fiction - 2724
Poetry - 0
Total Words - 3219
Editing Hours - 0
Paragraphs of Notes - 3

Not bad, not bad, but I could have done much better. I have to be honest here and admit that most of those words happened on Saturday.

I had great plans to finish my bridge story on Friday during nap time (the grandbaby’s, not mine), but although I took my lap top with me to the daughter’s house and remembered the power cord, I forgot the mouse. And seeing as the first thing I did with that lap top was disable the track pad, it didn’t exactly help me access anything.

But Saturday was a good day to write. It started at the local library where I finished my story then went on to write about 1,000 words (two different scenes) on Wandering Wizards. Got some more words in when I went home but then I had to go to Wal-Mart to get some rolls for dinner and came back with the new Lynsay Sands book.

I tried not to read it, I really did, but I figured I deserved a reward after all that writing I did so I cracked it open Saturday night and finished it late Sunday afternoon. And by cracked I mean opened. I would never crack the spine on a book!

When I first started this blog I said I wasn’t going to stick to a schedule. I think that was about the time I just finished serializing Elemental Earth so I was feeling a little jaded about the whole thing. Take my advice, if you have the desire to serialize a novel, write it first then serialize it. You’ll save yourself a whole lot of time and trouble.

At one point I think I was serializing two novels at the same time, plus doing a flash fiction each Friday, plus a new poetry form each week (can’t remember what day), and a series of non-fiction pieces on another day. It gets wearing after a while. I remember with the flash fiction I’d spend almost as much time trying to come up with an idea as I did working on the actual story. And I started to hate those poetry forms. It was just too much.

At any rate, what I’ve learned over the past few years is that as much as I’d like to believe otherwise, I actually like schedules. Maybe not quite the strict schedules I was following before, but something a little looser.

I stopped posting writing updates on my regular blog because it’s for, well, regular stuff. Although I do post the repeat of my poetry there on Fridays because people seem to like my poetry. I do an update of what’s going on in my life on Mondays, and because health has become such a big issue with me lately, I’m thinking of adding some kind of health/fitness post on Wednesdays. Probably not until the new year though.

Over here I’ve been doing the wordage report on Mondays, to keep me honest about my writing progress (or lack thereof), something poetic on Wednesdays (the first Wednesday of the month is always a poetry form), and fiction on Fridays - sometimes a prompt (always on the first Friday of the month), sometimes a flash story (or two), and sometimes an excerpt.

If that’s not a schedule, I don’t know what is. :-D

So it looks like I have to change my little manifesto on the side bar, doesn’t it?

In the meantime, don’t forget to check back on Wednesday for a new poetry form and on Friday for October’s picture prompt.