NaNo - Day Ten

As of the typing of this I'm starting to fall behind on my words. Day Ten's goal is 16,670 and my total is 15,928, which is 818 words short. I have only myself to blame. I bragged how this year I was keeping on track instead of falling behind, so I guess I was due. :-)

I had an epiphany regarding my NaNo novel today. I may not have mentioned this before, but I'm working from an old idea. I had to delve deep into the old story trunk for this one. It's about ten years old and though I originally started out strong with it, the story kind of petered out because I only had a vague idea where it was going.

But it piqued my attention when I was searching for a NaNo idea. I had a lot of notes and a long prologue. I was good to go. First thing was to scrap the cheesy prologue. It concerned the two main characters saying goodbye as young teens, pledging their undying love to each other. Gag me! I may salvage some of it later as a dream sequence, but that'll be as good as it gets.

Anyway, in the original concept there was only a hint of a Super Secret Society (SSS), so one of the things I'm doing is fleshing this organization out. It's going to be a driving force behind the suspense of the story.

There was also only a hint of what's really going on, and I'm a little more clear on that as well. But my epiphany was the beginning. I finally figured out how to start it. I knew the grandfather had to die, but I didn't know how or under what circumstances. I think in the original concept he just died of a heart attack or something mundane, but I decided if I'm going to start out with his death, it needs to be a good one. So the SSS will have to involved. And it'll happen before he's able to pass on a secret that will become an important plot point.

AND, because this unrevealed secret is so important, there'll have to be clues for my characters to follow, the SSS nipping at their heels.

I love it when a plot comes together! ;-)

NaNo - Day 7

You might not have noticed, but I removed the progress bar for my NaNo novel from the sidebar on the right. It seemed a little redundant when I have the official NaNo widget right above it. Besides, I have to generate a new one and go into design mode every time I want to change it, while the NaNo one updates automatically.

Surprisingly enough, I've been staying pretty much right on track this year. The total showing right now (which will change when I update later tonight) is 10,130 words. When you add in the 1,000 words I've written so far today and the 600 or more I plan on writing later, I'll be a couple of words over today's goal of 11,669 before I pack it in tonight.

My normal pattern for NaNo is to start out way behind, catch up, fall way behind again, catch up and get ahead, then fall behind again only to put on an impressive burst of words at the very end. So what's different this year? I'll tell you.

Prior to NaNo this year, I got into the wonderful habit of writing every day. My amazing friend Jamie, has been emailing me on a daily basis to remind me to write. And I not only have to send her my daily word count, I have to include a couple of sentences of what I've written. And they have to be new sentences, I can't cheat and give her something from earlier in my WIP, 'cause she'll know. I don't know how I know she'll know, I just do. :-)

I started out a few hundred words at a time, feeling like it was a good day if I reached 500 words. But as I struggled to get Lucky Dog finished before NaNo, that number crept upwards until a good day was 1,000 words or better. So it was good training for this month.

Can I keep up the pace? Guess only time will tell. :-)

NaNo - Day 4

So . . . let me tell you a little about my NaNo novel, tentatively titled Guardian of The Sea.

I actually feel like I'm cheating a little. I skipped over the first chapter where I had to come up with a super secret organization of bad guys who are about to kill my main character's grandfather, and went straight to the more ordinary stuff.

My main character is named Octavia Winston, Tavi to her friends. Ten years ago she was in a car accident that left her mother in a wheelchair without the ability to communicate, and Tavi herself with no memory.

Her mother has just died, and while cleaning out her mother's room, Octavia discovers an envelope, with her name on it, taped to the back of a dresser. This leads her (eventually) to a house on a sea cliff that she's been dreaming of for the last ten years. From here things get a little complicated. :-)

She discovers that her father isn't really her father, her grandfather was hiding a secret, and she meets a man she was in love with as a teenager. Oh, yeah, and someone's trying to kill her to gain control of the property she's inherited.

There's going to be some shape-shifting going on, but that's a little further on in the story. :-)

Right now Octavia and her friend Vanessa are exploring her new house, and her mystery man is lurking around in the background. I'm thinking her fiancé isn't about to let her get away that easily, especially since he's one of the ones who wants the property.

As I'm typing this post, I'm about 1500 words behind (on the meters) but once I update I should only be around 500 or so behind. Not bad considering I got a late start.

Once More Into the Breech . . .

So here's the thing. The title/heading of this post is kind of misleading. It implies that there's been posts before this one and while technically that's true, at the same time it isn't.

Once upon a time I had a blog called Writers Write, Right? It was attached to my main blog as a page tab at the top called: Current Projects. It was the place where I could sporadically talk about my writing, post a little poetry, update my progress bars . . . only I didn't.

A couple of months ago I started thinking about it again, trying to figure out where I went wrong and how I could fix it.

Then my buddy Jamie and I started a mutual "email nag" - where we'd nag each other to get something specific done each day (mine was to write). It was, for the most part, successful. What it did was get me writing every day.

Anyway, to start the new ball rolling, the month is November and the name of the game is NaNoWriMo. If you don't know what that is, go HERE. Once upon a time I did a PowerPoint presentation about it and if I had paid better attention in class I'd be able to embed it in a post. But I didn't, so I can't. :-)

So beginning tomorrow, I'm going to start reporting on my NaNo progress. 50,00 words in 30 days. As I write this I'm a little behind. I got off to a slow start because I was determined to finish at least one of the two books I was working on. And I'm happy to say I did. The first draft of Lucky Dog is finished, all that's left is the editing. Which, as everyone knows, is where the real work of writing starts.

I Lied

You know in my last post where I said it was getting better? Well I lied. Big time. :-)

I lost another day to sickness last week, but most of the time I was just busy. Now that the nicer weather's arrived, this will happen more often I'm sure. Which is why, theoretically, I'm supposed to get all my writing done during the week. Which, of course, didn't happen last week.

And I'm off coffee at least temporarily. Normally when I hit the afternoon slump during the week I'd have a half a pot of coffee to boost my creativity. I don't know if that's really what was happening or it was just a psychosomatic thing, but it worked for me. And now I'm finding that after lunch when my energy takes a nose dive, it takes my creativity with it.

So. I need to find a new way of boosting my creativity/energy in the afternoons. Any suggestions? And please do not insult my intelligence by telling me I just need to get some more exercise. Been there, done that. If I exercise in the afternoon then that just leads to napping. Seriously! I get more tired than doing nothing at all.

My Thursday lunch date and I - okay, so last week it was Wednesday, but normally it's Thursday - did the "take our notebooks to lunch" thing again, and this time I got a little more done than last time. So it's progress, anyway. I'm working on a kind of Halloween themed, scary story, and I think I need to print it out again before I can continue. It's getting kind of hard to see the typing under all the hand written notes. :-)

I did not get a new installment for Earth written last week, so I foolishly promised to get two done this week. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then I thought I'd get some writing in over the weekend. I didn't, and it's time to pay the piper. So the first installment went up today, and the second one will be up on its normal day.

WORDAGE REPORT

BLOG POSTS (not counting this one)
The actual total isn't a lot less than last week, but I did fewer of them and the total word count wouldn't be as high if I hadn't been so verbose in Monday's Post

Total: 2666 words

EDITING
Time spent editing last week was zero. :-)

NEW IDEAS
I have no new ideas to report.

POETRY
I did warn you. Poetry is fine when it comes spontaneously, but I'm not going to try and force it.

words = 0

NEW WORDS

An Elemental Earth -947
Lucky Dog - 0
Forever and For Always - 0

Total New Words - 947

It's Getting Better

Just as I was finally getting my writing mojo back, I got sick. Dag nabbit! I got a few words done on Lucky Dog on Friday, but ran out of time. Oh, well. There's always the weekend, right? Wrong. I was so sick on the weekend I couldn't even read, let alone write.

Even though my overall wordage was down last week, I still think things are getting better because I'm venturing beyond just blog posts and my serial. Although I didn't get as much done on Lucky Dog as I would have liked, I did do something, and that included deleting 87 words.

I also did a bunch of poetry, which totally took me by surprise. I was transferring notes that I had scatter through various notebooks and scraps of paper into a single book for writing stuff and a separate one for poetry, and found some notes about some poems I'd intended on writing, so I sat down and wrote them.

Thursday I went to lunch with a writing buddy and we took our notebooks (the paper kind, not the electronic kind) with us. The idea was to try and get some writing done in long hand. Well, it worked for her, but I spent more time staring off into space than anything else. And of course just when I finally got working on my story, it was time for lunch. I never did get back to that story, but it's been in my mind ever since.

I actually enjoy writing long hand. After all, that's how I got started writing in the first place. I write my journal in long hand, and my poetry (although I type my poems on the computer when I'm done). And pen and paper are so much easier (and lighter) than a lap top if you want to write somewhere other than the comfort of your own home. I say pen, but actually I use pencil when I'm composing (usually). So I'll probably try writing in a notebook again, maybe somewhere a little quieter. And we'll see what happens.

WORDAGE REPORT

BLOG POSTS (not counting this one) Now here's something interesting. I did three posts over on this blog last week, and yet my overall total for Blog Posts is 200 words less. Go figure. Guess I just didn't have as much to say. But I guarantee next week's totals will be higher - I have a lot to say on tomorrow's Wildcard post, and I've doing a bunch of reading lately so the Friday post should be wordier too.

Total:
2751 words

EDITING

Time spent editing last week was zero. :-)

NEW IDEAS

See? I shouldn't have complained last week. I have no new ideas to report.

POETRY
For a new category, this one sure has been seeing lots of action lately. But like I said in yesterday's post, don't expect to see this on a regular basis. Poetry is fine when it comes spontaneously, but I'm not going to try and force it.

517 words

NEW WORDS
Last week's installment of Earth was a real struggle, so it was shorter by about 200 words. I don't know why this story is giving me such hissy fits. It's not like it's my first serial. But things just aren't progressing the way I've envisioned - some things are going faster, some slower. And some in the wrong order. *sigh* And with Lucky Dog, the spirit is willing but the hands want to skip ahead to the good stuff. Not that it's not all good stuff, but there's a couple of events that happen near the end and I want to skip ahead to them. But skipping is very, very bad and leads to plot holes and such.

An Elemental Earth - 979
Lucky Dog - 198
Forever and For Always - 0

Total New Words - 1177

Pour It Forth

So apparently that little poem I wrote a week ago was like turning on a spigot. Today I sat down and wrote five of them! Now granted, a couple of them were works in progress, but still. That's a pretty good haul considering the creative slump I've been in lately.

I'm only going to share two of them today 'cause they all turned out a little on the depressing side, but sometimes that's just the way the words come out. And don't expect me to be posting a poem every week. Been there, done that, and what it does is turns the poetry into a chore. It went from something I enjoyed, to something I struggled with, to something I loathed. And that was probably a good part of the reason I've been absent from poetry so long. So like everything else on this blog, expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to posting. :-)



Black and Silver

I used to have a silver pen
to use to write in a book
a black book
a journal book
a journey book
the journey of a small part
of my life
of my thoughts
of my dreams . . .
the sense of living
of having lived.
In this book I wrote:
"A moment in time
caught like a fly in amber."
The rest of the pages are black
the rest of the pages are blank
and I wonder
whatever happened to that pen?
whatever happened to my life?

C.R. Ward 05/05/2014


Judgement

You do not know me
and yet you judge me
you form your opinion
without knowing the facts.

I'm the woman in the corner
sipping her latte
wearing long sleeves
to hide her shattered dreams.

I'm the man whose hand trembles
ever so slightly
as he reaches for his coffee
wishing it was something else.

I'm the life of the party
everyone's darling
hiding the emptiness
behind a cheerful facade.

I'm the girl in the corner
alone with her book
the words her armour
to keep the world at bay.

I'm the fat girl in high school
I'm the boy with the acne
I'm the man with the ragged coat
I'm the woman with scars.

I'm the blind man with the tin cup
I'm the woman sleeping in the alley
I'm the kid on the skateboard
I'm man playing sax in the subway.

I speak and my words fly away
you listen, but you do not hear.
You do not know me
yet you judge me
still.

C.R. Ward 05/05/2014