Friday Excerpt: Faith Gets Bad News
Here are 400 words (actually a little less) from my NaNoWriMo book. Remember it isn’t polished or edited at all! This is rough, rough draft. lol. (but still feel free to offer critique) ### Old lady Smythe was looking at her again. Faith found the old woman creepy. She had a small smile on her face all the time and a gleam in her eyes that suggested she knew everything about everyone. Faith tried to avoid her, not wanting her own secrets sussed out, but it seemed like the old woman was always hanging around her. She must have a nose for trouble and knew even before Faith herself did that Faith was destined for trouble. Faith was laying on her bunk and staring blankly at the white floor while she thought. She was reminising about the last time she and Reece...
Read MoreNaNoWriMo: The Log Line
You saw my sprawling blurb earlier, which needs lots of work. Â A blurb is critical in the success of selling a story. Â A log line is also extremely valuable. Â I’ve bought books more than once on the power of the log line alone. What is a log line? Â It’s the one sentence description better known in movies. Being able to sum up your plot in one sentence that has the hint of a unique and interesting plot gives you a fast way to connect with readers. Â The ability to write a pithy one line is also great for author bios and tweeting. Â It’s not a skill that comes naturally to me! Here is a good overview of writing a log line for a novel. And here are some examples of book log lines that I think are really good. These have gotten me to click on the link...
Read MoreNaNoWriMo: The Biggest Challenge
What is the most challenging part of NaNoWriMo for me? Â Letting the writing be bad. There are two major ways that people write. Some push themselves to write a first draft very quickly, turning off the inner editor and letting the writing be bad until they can polish it later. Others have a hard time ever getting a book written because they can’t move to a new section until what they have is completely perfect. Most of us, I think, fall somewhere in the middle of this. I know I do. Â I produce a fair amount of writing, I don’t have trouble finishing books. Â Yet I also polish a little bit as I go. In a day I might write a couple new scenes and also revise and polish some other scenes. To get the crazy word count of NaNoWriMo, one needs to be able to set...
Read MoreNaNo By the Numbers
Even though I’m not good at math, I still love to measure progress with numbers. Â It motivates me and excites me to break down my writing into word counts. So, my personal goal for NaNo is 80,000 words. (That is more than I’ve ever written on any project. My novel (W)hole is 65,000 and that’s the longest I’ve ever written). I have an outline with, as the moment, 95 scenes. That means that if every scene were of equal length, they would need to be: 843 words, which is about three pages. Â To make sure I have enough words, I’ll probably work to try to get every scene at least that long. Â Three pages is a lot for me, though, so I might try to break down the outline into more basic scenes, see if there’s anywhere that I’m...
Read MoreNaNoWriMo: Software
Before I started NaNo this year I did some reading about what other people are doing with it. One thing I cam across was a software recommendation. Writing novels in Word and most word processing programs is very difficult. They really weren’t designed for writing and keeping track of 300 page documents. Â Though I follow an outline, I don’t write linearly at all. Â In fact, having an outline allows me to write any scene or part of the story that interests me at the particular moment. Â Trying to organize a novel that you’re writing non-linearly in a word processing program is quite a headache! I’ve been doing it for years, though. Â It’s always how I’ve written (by the way, in January I’m going to have a free book available...
Read MoreProgress Trackers
At proofreaders; available for pre-order
What Is Meant To Be
Second draft
Homework & Homicide (working title)
Second Draft
Book Montage
RFW winner October 7, 2011
