After 30 grueling days of writing, ignoring my husband, and abandoning my friends, NaNoWriMo has come to an end. And with it my 50,091 words. I've still got a long way to go (about another 30,000 words) but I'm well on my way to having two completed novels under my belt. Yea me!
So far he's been concussed, given a black eye and knocked on his ass by his best friend only to fall on a stick that got pushed a few inches into his back. He's having a rough book.
I drink vitaminwater everyday at work. Formula 50 (when I can find it), Energy, Multi-V and XXX. So when I found their new contest to name the next flavor - Black Cherry Lime - and write the copy for the bottle I was stoked. My first entry used their Mad-Lib style format to create the copy and I named it Verve. My second, however, I thought up on my drive home from work tonight. Though I can't seem to draft decent copy at work to save my life, I think I nailed this one. Maybe it's the tone. The sacrastic, snarky, wittiness that comes with vitaminwater. But I'm damn proud of Ignite and think I should win. Wouldn't you agree?
"Some days it's a struggle to do...well anything. We know you'd rather curl up with the fuzzy animal of your choice and the latest How-Well-Do-You-Know-X quiz on Facebook. But let's face it, life's hard. You have to go to school or work or whatever it is that the day demands of you. But the full range of vitamins A to Zinc plus caffeine in this very bottle can be the spark to set your world on fire. So get your mitts on Ignite and get your butt out the door."
National Novel Writing Month starts in November. And I just signed up.
The challenge: write a 50,000-word novel in a month.
The stats: 1,667-words/day or approx. 6 pages/day
The book: a story about sisters and cupcakes and the men they love
I think I'm up for the challenge.
Over the past few months, I've been furiously working on "the book". Copyediting, rewriting, cutting, rearranging. I've been reading books on structure, scene, character, how to get published, what not to do, etc. Now I've hit the proverbial wall. The book has had a name for eight plus years. And I love the name. But after all of my reading, I'm not sure the name is doing the book any favors. It may be time to edit it too. Would any of these names capture your attention on the book shelf?
I (along with two other Talkers) made the Star News' "Tweets of the Week" list for last week. My entry came from Friday night when I was about to head for home. And my TV. Gotta love DVR.
Fear that I only ever had one complete book in me has been haunting me for years. Brewing under the surface and bubbling violently over into reality when the prospect of finally completing the first novel seemed too daunting a task.
That all changed on the drive to work yesterday. I had a name stuck in my head along with a picture of a cupcake from the bookmark of my new Real Simple subscription (thanks Mom!). That's all it took.
Now if I can ever finish editing and then draft and edit a query letter to find myself an agent (literary agent that is), I will actually write a second book. And it will revolve around two sisters and a cupcakery (a cupcake bakery that is). Harper and Jack are already blabbing away in my head but I must resist the temptation to really listen until Reminders is complete.
Must not, must not, must not write anything new. Yet.
I think that by the end of the month, I might be, maybe sorta kinda, finished with the full first draft of my book.
I have one spiral notebook for the book, and another one for all other writing ie: ideas for future projects. One in particular is a very bare bones listing of characters for a young adult novel. It's been sitting open on the living room floor for a month now so I can quickly jot down names like "The Nova Academy" or "Jaclyn 'Jack' Gregory" before they slip out of my head again.
Lately, Chaucer has taken to picking at the notebook, using his front (clawless) paws to knead it curling the pages in the process. Today I looked down and he was eating the page. Litererally chewing the bottom right corner and pulling pieces off like he was going to eat my story piece by piece.
It makes me wander if he thinks I'm paying too much attention to my computer and not enough to him.
I gave the blog a facelift today. And something about the change makes me feel more sophisticated, grown up. Like I could actually finish my book and be a published author. Like I could open a stationery store one day and spend my afternoons surrounded by paper. Like I may actualy get to do all the things that live quietly inside my head desperately hoping one day to be real.
I realized today that I after I finish The Book, I may be a young adult writer. I'm not sure how it happened, but it did. I have a few outlines of characters and plots for books about teens. And I want to write them. I'm trying to come to grips with my future by reading more young adult lit to convince myself that it is respectable. is JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer can do it, maybe writing for teens isn't such a bad thing. Right?
At lunch today, I told Mark that I finally gave into an idea and now my novel has a new direction.
His response: "You added vampires didn't you?"
(If this doesn't make sense to you read a few posts back about Twilight and it will all become clear. And to answer his question - No.)
After years of rebelling against romance of any kind in my writing, I have finally given in. For the longest time, I didn't want to be seen as one of "those" writers. I didn't want to be chick-lit or romance novel-ish. I wanted to be respectable. I wanted to be literature.
I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and have my stories mean something. Somehow in my mind I felt that being literary mean that I had to give up the things I enjoy (ie romantic love) to be replaced by grown-up plots and ten-dollar words. But I read romance novels, devour them actually, and I lap up any good love story. And stories don't have as much impact on me if they don't make my heart sigh.
So why do I consider these authors and books to be serious literature, but not my own?
And that's when something clicked in my sluggish brain. This deep rooted seed of romance sprang to life and my novel has a new purpose. The mental block lifted and I could clearly see the path Aden was to take to get to the happy ending. Just by accepting that two characters are meant to be (which in my head I knew, but never allowed to be acknowledged on paper), everything fit in place.
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