writings

17 years

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Well, it’s been a while. This website has been online for 17 years today, yay? I certainly don’t use it to its fullest potential (find me on Twitter for the most up to date stuff–it’s easier to post there, and I don’t usually have big thoughts worthy of a blog post).

Instead, have a haiku.

I have written books
but only in my mind’s eye
ephemeral words

via GIPHY

Inner worlds

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innerworlds.jpgThere are universes inside my head. Not literal ones, of course. No, just the worlds of imagination. I have stories that take place in different times, different worlds, places not our own, just floating around up there.

It’s a fun place to be, sometimes.
Plenty of stories, they just have to be written down.
One day.
Sure, I’ve written several hundred thousand words of stories for NaNoWriMo. And amazingly, none of them are in the same world; all of them are discreet places. I have some ideas for sequels, but haven’t finished the first in a series; can’t move on till the first is finished, etc.
I’ll just keep the ideas percolating, swimming around in the starfield of my own personal imaginary universe.
What’s your favorite inner world?
(image via iwastesomuchtime.com)

Spellcliff

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NaNo 2011 Winner badge

I know I haven’t said much about NaNo here this year, but it was sort of a busy time, being ML for the St. Louis region and all. For year eight, I wrote another fantasy (of course). Here’s the one-sentence summary:
When a librarian finds a murdered historian in the undocumented vaults of the library, she discovers that magic, unusable for centuries, is returning to the world, and those who once wielded it are returning to take back their homeland.

It kind of ended up being like that, so I guess I stuck to the synopsis better than I have in previous years. Yes, I did manage to actually have a dead body show up in the first chapter right when it was supposed to, as opposed to last year, when I didn’t kill the person I was planning on until the very last section. Planning, it is your friend when writing.
There’s still more to go. I’ll see how many words I can put down tomorrow night, but I’ve got that purple bar of win, and it makes me smile.
Here’s to those of you who took this jaunt into literary abandon with me, and those who are still chugging along. Keep writing, my friends!

(Google+ edit:
Scrivener says 50,148; NaNoWriMo says 50,033. Either way, I just won NaNo for an eighth time.

Anthony MatheniaWay to go Jen on your eighth win! Thanks for all the hard work you do to support others!

Jennifer ShewThanks +Anthony Mathenia for all your good posts this year! I don’t know where you found the time 😉 Congrats to you too.

Make NaNoWriMo Great

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This year marks my eighth year participating in NaNoWriMo and my fifth year as a Municipal Liaison for the St. Louis region of said program. That means that I’ve written at least 350,000 words in the last seven years, and I plan to add another 50k onto that this year. Maybe more, if I can cudgel a few more ideas out of this brain of mine. So I think I have a pretty good idea of what makes for a good time while you’re on your crazy experience with literary abandon.

First, make sure you plan a little bit. You don’t have to make a full outline with Roman numerals detailing every movement of your (triply-named) character–that can get boring, fast, since you already know what’s going to happen, so why write it?–but you should at least figure out a few details about your world, its magic system (yes, I write fantasy, what of it?), a few names that fit in this world (there are tons of generators out there), and a few plot points you’d like to work into the story. This will give you something other than a blank screen to stare at when midnight rolls around on November 1st, and you’ll be glad to get that first 1667 words out of the way. Planning also could span preparing your writing software. Some people are fine with a plain Word document, others (like me) use a program like Scrivener, which is designed for authors. There are lots of features and there is a learning curve, but you don’t have to use everything baked into the software. Use only what you need, and try to get used to it before you start plonking out words.
Second, get your butt in a chair (or beanbag, or coffeehouse booth, etc) and write. The words won’t show up on their own. Hopefully you’ve been planning, so you have ideas ready for you when you start writing. If you’ve run off your outline or your mind map, but still need words for the day, try freewriting (write whatever comes into your head, even if it has nothing to do with your story–keep your fingers moving on that keyboard, no matter what) or look up some writing prompts or even search for inspirational pictures related to your story. Anything to keep the words flowing. Make them up. It doesn’t matter if they further your plot for NaNo–quantity over quality here. Quality is for revision time. You can try the virtual writer’s dice here if you are absolutely stuck.
Third, and utterly contradicting #2, is to not write all the time. If you force yourself to do something, it will probably make you unhappy. If you force yourself to do something at the expense of something else (like meeting a friend for dinner or seeing that movie you’ve been waiting for) you will start to dislike the thing you’re forcing yourself to do, and it won’t be fun anymore. Don’t get to that point. Remember, NaNo is not your life. Take breaks. Don’t forget to eat or pet the cat. Remind your significant other that you exist outside your writing room. Call your mom. Then get back to writing when you’re refreshed.
Fourth: the combination of 2 and 3. Be social with your writing. Come to a write-in or three during November. You might surprise yourself with how much you like them. I know they’re not for all people, and that’s fine–but it’s a very nice thing to realize you need a plot point, and you can just ask the room at large, and one will be found for you. If you don’t want to go out, try browsing the NaNo forums (particularly your regional lounge, where there is lots of important information from your MLs! Just sayin’) and pose your plot problems there. I’ve met a bunch of interesting people through NaNoWriMo, and you can too. St. Louis is having a writing marathon on the 20th…
Last, and perhaps most important: do what works for you. Some people can write several thousand words a day without thinking about it. I quite often have trouble just reaching my word count goal, but I’ve managed to write 50k every year, even when I was faced with a major biochem paper due on November 29. Don’t be afraid of the large number. Don’t be afraid of failure–just by writing something you have already surpassed the majority of your peers who have only ever talked about writing a novel. You’re not crazy; hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same thing you are. Write the best you can; write as much as you can, and call that a win.
See you in November!

Romantic

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Candle

Image via Wikipedia

From the oneword prompt “romantic.”

There was a bottle of wine and a candle on the table when I got home. Next to the candle was a matchbox and a note:

“Light the candle and drink the wine, and think of me. I can’t be with you but know that I’m doing the same thing, wherever I am. Love you.”

I started to cry.

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Uncharted

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This song has been earworming around my head all day and now it has inspired a story snippet. Don’t know where it will go, and of course it’s fantasy. Just recording it here for motivation.

We were in uncharted territory now. The tales and fishwives said the witch could be found beyond the borders of the world, and we had passed the last marker of the great King’s odyssey leagues ago. The fishwives also told us we were courting insanity by leaving what we knew, but finding a hypothetical witch was better than dying, so we walked off the edge of the map.

A whisper of a dream

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Would you kill to save a life? Would you kill to prove you’re right?

A glimmer of an idea teases my muse and I marvel at its source–a 30 Seconds to Mars song. I don’t know if there’s a story behind it or it’s just an idle fragment of bought that could be built upon. I put it here so I’d be held accountable for it. Violent? Maybe. But there’s a hint of truth there, a longing for justice, propelling someone headlong into something they could not possibly understand. I don’t know why any of these things would be happening, but that’s part of the magic of creation, isn’t it?

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THE END in 2010

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I managed to finagle a way to write THE END at the conclusion of NaNoWriMo 2010. It’s sort of kludgy and there are lots of things that don’t make a lot of sense and plenty of wrong turns and dangling plot points, but I did end the story. It’s only a smidge over 50,000 words, but I don’t mind. It’s a story, by golly!

I could probably cut it down quite a bit and make it a decent short story, but I’m (not quite as equally) sure I could pad it out and figure out where some of those dangling plotlines actually end up. I wrote myself into a corner and wrote myself back out, and also managed to use some of the conveniently placed plot points that I somehow put in early in the story, but I also strayed VERY VERY far from my synopsis, which makes me sad. I think it would have been a better story if I’d figured out how to stick to what I originally planned. I don’t know if that’s a (not really) rousing endorsement to continue my pantsing ways, or to get tough with my muse and start planning the damn things out before 11:30 pm on October 31.

What’s it about? Well, it was supposed to be about a Writer (in my world, Writers write plays where the actors truly become their characters for the length of the play) whose mentor is killed, and all signs point to the Writer as doing it, only she didn’t! So she has to clear her name and figure out who put the bad mojo on her. Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to the murder until the end of the story (yes, I did the bad and all the action is in the last 10,000 words), so the mystery part of my murder mystery never materialized. However, I did end up with an angry, ambitious ghost-in-the-play who possesses one of the actors and wreaks all sorts of havoc. He’s one-sided, sure, but he was pretty good at being bad. There was also more blood and gore than I’ve ever tried to write, and I was reminded again at how squeamish I can be. I wanted to be a doctor? (sigh)

Anyway, the book has an ending. This is only the second book in seven years to which that has happened, so I really have to work on that. Maybe next year I’ll try to up the goal. But I have plenty of trouble just writing 1667 words a day that I don’t know if I could try to double it…but maybe 2k a day would be doable. We’ll see next year, won’t we?

TGIO party tomorrow, yay!

For those of you who think NaNo is a waste of time, read this:

Other good links:

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Style

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Not fashion style, as I have very little of that. I’ll take comfort over fashion any day. But writing style, that’s something different. I’ve never really been sure I have a style, other than faintly imitative of Carol Berg or Jim Butcher. I’m not good at categorization, which is sort of funny since my mom is really good at it. Anyway, there’s a meme floating around about analyzing your writing and comparing it to famous writers, and here’s my result, based on my last blog entry. Perhaps I should finally read some of his work…

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

One of these days I’ll dredge up some of my NaNo stuff and see how that pans out.

I would like all the people in my life with money issues to stop having them. And I would like my tomatoes and zucchini to fruit.