Monday, December 28, 2009

To be continued . . .

This was originally a mobile post that came out all wrong, so I'm just correcting the error, but I'll still keep it to re-creating the original mobile post:

Texting, emailing, mobile blogging, Blackberrying, iPhoning, and all similar handheld habits are the new smoking cigarettes.  This is the real reason that college smoking statistics have gone down - no one in college needs to smoke to kill time anymore!  Discuss.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!

I finished the month of November with my NaNo word count at 51,246.  I'm a winner! 



It was a little close at the end, but I managed to hit 50K with about an hour and a half to spare last night.  Go me.  Winning NaNo this year feels a little bittersweet, though.  First of all because the book is not done.  But last year's wasn't completed in November, either, and in fact, despite winning NaNo a few days early last year, that book was no where near done at 50K words.  The final, completed first draft of NaNo 2008 is around 123,000 words.  Right now, One Constant (because at least this year's has a working title) sits on my flash drive at 51,246 words.  It's closer to complete than NaNo 2008 was at this point, but I'm far less happy with it, and far less excited about writing it or finishing it.  There are a number of chapters (like, four maybe?) that end with a few sentences of "notes to self" of where I'd like the rest of the chapter to go, but that I just got stuck when I was writing.  These last few chapters that I just wrote and that I'm about to write are going to be the best part of it, and that's disappointing - to know that I'm going to need to rewrite or rework most of what I've spent the last month toiling over to even make it decent.  *Sigh*  I think with another 10 or 20 thousand words, I can have a finished first draft to start tearing apart.  I don't want to start editing until I get beginning to end down on paper.  Of course, that's where I left off last year's, in what? February?  March?  I can get this one done much sooner than that, I think.  There's not too much left to write, and I already have entire conversations swirling through my head, so it shouldn't be too much to finish.

My monthly writing plans for the near future:
December: Finish first draft of One Constant and develop anothr idea for a novella to be written in January
January: Kiwi Writers New Year Novella Challenge - write and edit.
February: Spend all writing time for the month seriously editing NaNo 2008
March: Revisit One Constant for content, structure and style

Let's see how well I stick with this.