This ‘N That

Once again it’s been a while, but at least it hasn’t been another 18 months. :-D

What can I say? The spirit was willing but the rest of me had a bunch of stuff on the go. I was on the committee for the Northumberland Hills Stitchery Guild’s 40th Anniversary Tea, and as such there was planning and meetings, etc., which I took part in. Then there was the baking . . . oh, so much baking: 3 dozen mini plain scones, 3 dozen mini ginger scones, 3 dozen mini blueberry scones, not to mention a batch that was gluten free. Then there was 30 mini quiches, 24 crustless quiches, 30 lemon tarts, 24 mini cheesecakes, and a few dozen brownies – some of which were gluten free.

At the same time, I was also making a dress for the granddaughter’s last father/daughter ball. The theme was Under the Sea, and because it was the last time she’d be able to participate (they have a cut off year for age) I went all out. She requested a dress with squid tentacles, and I was happy to oblige. I used iridescent organza to give it the underwater effect.

I only planned to take the weekend off after that, to give myself time to recuperate, but a funny thing happened . . . I picked up the latest Nora Roberts book (that I hadn't read yet), and when I was finished reading it I may have, kind of, kept going. As in, I pulled about half a dozen previously read books off my shelf and read them, too.

The good news is, I think I’m over the reading madness and I’m back to reading just a couple of hours a day. And I have nothing major going on, except hanging with the granddaughter four days a week. They’re not even full days either, just from lunch time to late afternoon, leaving my mornings free for writing.

But even with my reading binge, it’s not like I haven’t been doing any writing. I’ve been doing my morning pages . . . granted sometimes it’s more like morning page, and I’ve been doing a daily three-minute word, where I pick a word at random and write for three minutes using it as a prompt.

Sometimes I take the notebook I use for my morning pages with me when I go for my morning walk and sit down on the pier to write. I’ve seen some interesting characters, and I’ve come up with at least one potential story idea. It’s something to work on when I need a break from editing An Elemental Spirit.

I’ve set myself a goal for Elemental Spirit. I want to be able to release it into the wild by the end of the year, or, most likely, January of next year. I’m going to deserve those vanity plates yet!

All Good Plans…

Let me start by saying I did get some writing in last week, just not enough to include in a proper wordage report. And as I promised to be honest here I have to admit it wasn’t so much that I was busy (which I was) it was more that I got lazy and doing online jigsaw puzzles is much more fun than writing.

Plus I’m sick. *cough, cough* I have a really bad, over the counter medicine resistant sinus infection and a dry cough. But the good news is that I already had an appointment scheduled with my doctor for Wednesday so hopefully she’ll give me some antibiotics to knock it right out of me.

I am also forced to admit that despite my vow not to worry about how messy my office was I spent the first couple of days last week cleaning it up. But after shopping and doing a minimalist indoor decorating job for Christmas, it now looks like this again:

Here’s my white flag of surrender office, I promise not to try and clean you up again until the holidays are over.

But I hope you noticed that I did get all my blog posts done last week, so I think I deserve a pat on the back for that, don’t you? And I didn’t once revert to my old stand-by for December and fill my post with holiday music videos. I’ll save that for next week. :-D

I’ve already started thinking of a few goals for next year. One is to finish Shattered, another is to finish Wandering Wizards which really should have been out for last Christmas. I’m also determined to gather up some of my shorter stuff (and there’s a lot of it because I’m a sucker for a good writing prompt) and put together an anthology.

Last year I embraced the Icelandic tradition of jólabókaflóð, or Christmas Book Flood. I sent a book and tea/hot chocolate to a select list of friends and family as a present to be opened before Christmas so they could enjoy both on Christmas Eve. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to send everyone on my list my own anthology next year? I just have to get it done in time. LOL

If you’d like to learn more about the Christmas Book Flood, go HERE.

Life After NaNo

Well, I did it. I finished my 50,000 words before midnight on November 30 and won the challenge. Actually, I reached my goal Thursday night but I wanted to add more words on Friday to get my "update your wordcount 30 days in a row" badge. And my reward? One more unfinished novel to add to my collection. LOL

That seems to be my pattern. I reach my 50,000 by the end of the month and…stop. NaNo’s over so I deserve a break right? My novels are usually in some stage of being close to finished. Some just need a scene or two, some more, but all of them need more work. Hence me my having 8 or 9 unfinished novels sitting around collecting dust.

The other thing I’m in the habit of is coming up for air at the end of NaNo, realizing Christmas is just three weeks away, and set the writing aside until the holidays are over. Inevitably, January rolls around and I’ve lost all desire to write and it takes weeks before I manage to get it back.

So this year I’ve decided two things.

First of all, I’m going to continue working on my NaNo novel. It’s one hot mess, and I’ve jumped around a bit, but I’m going to continue working on it until it is ready for editing. I figure another 15-20,000 words ought to do it.

When I ran into problems early on, I skipped ahead a couple of times, and then had some interesting ideas for the ending so I skipped to the end and wrote about 10,000 words for it. I did close the gaps in the first part, but there’s a good 15,000 words to bridge the beginning to the end. And then I just have to finish the very end – which may or may not include an epilogue.

The thing is, I like this story. And it’s a stand alone, not attached to any series, so there’s no reason I can’t make it available by next Christmas.

The second thing I’m going to do is keep writing throughout December. As in write every day. Magic II is going on the back burner for now – I don’t even have Magic I finished yet so there’s no rush for the sequel. It was more just to fill in the ‘what can I write’ gap when I ran out of steam with Wandering Wizards.

It’s always good to have more than one project on the go, that way if you just aren’t feeling it for one story, you can switch to the other. No sitting around trying to figure out what to write today.

So, that’s my plan, anyway. And that being said, I did no writing (except blog posts) on the weekend – I went Christmas shopping one day and present wrapping the next. But since this post and my other one were scheduled Sunday night, I’ll be starting my day off right – with time spent writing.

To do so I’ll have to ignore the mess my office has become. I’d hoped to get it cleaned up over the weekend but there just wasn’t time. But it doesn’t matter where I write, just so long as I write.

Of Plots and Plans and Things In Between...

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.
― Quentin R. Bufogle

This was the inspirational writing quote I sent to my best bud Jamie today, and in the accompanying email I said something to the effect that after careful consideration I have to agree with it. Writing doesn’t always make me happy, but it makes me a lot happier than not writing does.

The daughter was away for a conference this week, which necessitated me having to babysit during the day while her hubby was at work. Monday I was a disorganized mess. But Tuesday I discovered that by planning ahead things went much more smoothly. I even managed to get some writing in during the toddler’s nap time. Wednesday was the same.

I used to get very frazzled whenever I was expecting company, until I learned my aunt’s secret. She planned everything ahead of time, and did as much of the prep work for meals before the company arrived as she could. It’s amazing what a little planning can do.

During my writing time while I was babysitting, I was trying to work on a story but I wasn’t sure where it was going. So I jotted down a few plot points of what I wanted to have happen. That’s not to say I plotted the whole thing out, just a really short plan of the action.

A couple of weeks ago I used mini index cards to jot down the remaining scenes in the novel I’m currently working on, and even a couple of scenes closer to the beginning that I’ll have to go back to so I can fit them in. As plans go it’s not much, but it got me eager to start working on it again.

All of this made me realize that maybe there’s something to planning ahead after all.

Once upon a time I wrote a blog post about pantsers versus plotters. It’s fairly simple. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants - they just sit down and write, having no clear of what’s going to happen until they write it. Plotters, on the other hand, plan everything out ahead of time so there are no surprises.

Back when I was new to writing, I thought everyone was a plotter. So I spent a lot of time on outlines and maps and character sketches and eventually realized that I was spending more time on them (and having more fun in the process) than I was actually writing. My novel kind of stalled and it was years before I got back to it. Actually, my writing stalled - it was a few years before I got back to any of my longer fiction.

The first novel I actually finished was written purely by the seat of my pants. I was goaded convinced by Jamie to try my hand at a blog serial. I let the story progress naturally and most of the time I had no idea what was going to happen next. It was an adventure, albeit sometimes a frustrating one.

I wrote several other novels after that (that book turned into a series, of which I’m about to start number five), all by the seat of my pants. It was decided. I was a confirmed pantser.

But then I began to struggle a bit. My second series, based on that first attempted novel, began to flounder until I discovered all the character sketches, maps, and notes I made originally. While the characters had evolved well past those initial sketches, the notes were invaluable, as were the maps. Using the notes, I created the “scene cards” I mentioned earlier, half-sized index cards with a few words describing a single scene on each one. This will take me to the end of book three.

Maybe planning out a novel isn’t such a bad thing after all. Especially when you’re writing a series. And recalling those story notes I made ... I used to get an idea for a short story and just wing it. But knowing what’s going to happen actually makes it a little easier to write. And notes help jog my not-so-reliable memory when it falters.

So... while I doubt I’ll ever be doing a long-winded, multi-page, detailed outline such as plotters are famous for, neither will I dismiss the idea of a little planning ahead. I guess you could say I’m taking the middle road. “Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.”

I’m not totally a plotter, but neither am I strictly speaking a pantser anymore. I’m somewhere in between. I ... am a tweener!