November is gone. I have to take a moment, to lift my head from the laptop, to let my eyes adjust to the sunlight, to start breathing again. 50,011 words. National Novel Writing Month is over. I did it. None of it feels real. I wonder if this has to do with John Gardner's idea… Continue reading What I Learned from My First NaNoWriMo
can't talk right now got to write 5,653 words in three days or less with a national holiday in the middle whose idea was it to do this in November my god happy thanksgiving i guess and see you on the other side unless i write myself to death which is possible given i'm feeling… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 4 Update
Just looked at today's date and realized it's the end of NaNo Week 3. No blog post update drafted. Aaaaand that's how my week three is going, folks. I'm solidly beyond the "beginning" parts of the book, into what might tentatively be called the "middle." For me, writing the middle is more than a little… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 3 or Oops, I Forgot to Write a Blog Post
Popping my head up from the word-count trenches to give a quick, week-two update... (Here are my two previous posts about my NaNo foray if you're interested: my commitment to actually participate, and my week 1 update.) Definitely some rough days where my mental/creative energy output wasn't sufficient to hit that magic number (1,667 words). I gave… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 2
Thought I'd write a quick update for you all about how things on my first official National Novel Writing Month outing are going. The short, optimistic answer is: Good! The short, realistic answer is: Different than I expected! In a previous post, I talked about my strategy heading into this month of insane output. It… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 1
I'm going to try NaNoWriMo this year. That sentence is terrifying. Well, not if you don't know what the abbreviation stands for. It's National Novel Writing Month, which is November 1-30 every year. Basically, a bunch of psychos try to write 50,000-word novel drafts in a month. There's a little more nuance than that. But… Continue reading NaNoWriMo What Now?
Novel outlining methods look so great on paper. Everything is in neat steps. You basically have an organized checklist for writing 50k+ words. But none of them work for me. A large part of being an artist is understanding your own creative process. If you can learn to work with yourself, your strengths and weaknesses,… Continue reading The Feminine Creative Process
Got a little good news RE: the novel I've been working on. If that's interesting to you, awesome, and if not, no harm no foul. Ignore, click away, and good juju to you. Back in May, I entered my post-apocalyptic novel in the Colorado Gold Writing Contest. It's a novel-writing contest for unpublished writers that includes… Continue reading Writing Contest News…
Ursula K. Le Guin says, resoundingly, "Wrong!" The second chapter of her book on writing, Steering the Craft, is all about punctuation. (Check out my post about the first chapter here!) She writes, "...punctuation tells the reader how to hear your writing." It is a crucial tool, and not to be overlooked. My experience with… Continue reading Steering the Craft, Part 2: PUNCTUATION
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the best and most important contemporary writers of science fiction. Her prose is immaculate, whether she was focusing on gender politics in The Left Hand of Darkness, consumer culture in The Dispossessed, creating sci-fi tech that others will use for decades (the ansible: a communication device that relays… Continue reading Steering the Craft, Part 1: SOUND
Allison Wall 