Thursday, January 29, 2009

5,024 words in one week!

Daily word count: a paltry 476
Weekly word count: a winning 5,024!
LSCTS word count: a staggering 62,645!

Hooray! I made my weekly goal of writing 5,000 words! yay yay yay yay!

This is the first time I've met that challenge since I started Jan 1. It only took me a month to meet this goal.

My reward to myself is to go to my friend's party this Saturday. She lives in Portland, 90 minutes away from our place. Charles is going to stay and babysit so I can have fun with my high school buddy and her friends.

Mr. Rodger's song is appropriate here: I'm proud of me! I'm proud of me! I hope that you are proud of me, too.

Actually, NaNoWriMo was a much bigger accomplishment, but that didn't feel like "real life," but this does. Whatever. I'm doing it and that is what matters.

la
m

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Cal in Chi-town

Daily Word Count: 1,034
Weekly Word Count: 4,548
LSCTS Word Count: 62,169

It was a little hard getting to the word-goal tonight. I'm not feeling 100%, and the words and ideas came a little slowly, but I did it. Just one word after another.

And, hey! I may actually make my weekly goal of 5,000 words! I'm only 462 words away! That would be a first for this year.

Okay, off to bed. Nighty-night.
m

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

I like Nicolas Brown

Daily word count: 1,061
Weekly word count: 3,514
Project word count: 61,135

I think my character, Dr. Nicolas Brown, would drive me crazy if I were in a relationship with him because he says what he thinks all the time. It's an endearing quality, but it's going to get him into trouble--because that's what endearing qualities do to character eventually.

I actually wrote a poem for this chapter because Nicolas is a poet and wrote a piece inspired by Cal. So, it's on of his bad poems. I am not a poetess. One day I might give poetry a serious try, but frankly, it is intimidating. Very cool and fun, but intimidating. Kind of like writing a novel before you've tried it.

m

Monday, January 26, 2009

Hanky-panky ban

Daily word count: 1,068
Weekly word count: 2,453
LCTS word count: 60,074

I did a little math and realized that I may be able to get Liz Closes the Store to 80,000 by the end of February, if I can actually get to my writing goals.

So, my new goal is to get LCTS to 80K by 2/28/09. That's five weeks away. Five weeks times 5,000 words is 25K. That gives me a 5K cushion in of case another crime or illness.

The blog title refers to a scene I wrote today. Actually, lots of hanky but no panky goes on. I like this book. :)
m

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Cal has a date

Daily word count: 1,385
Weekly word count: 1,385
Book word count: 59,006

I have to be careful that Cal and Liz don't fuse in my mind and become the same character. Their reacts to things can be similar, and they need to be different.

Yay, big word count today. I'm going to bed.
m

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Cal gets a new love interest

Daily word count: 1,148
Weekly word count: 3,209

Actually, instead of a new love interest, I'm just expanding the love interest I hinted at in the "A" plot of the story. He's cute. That's all I'm saying for now.

Coffee with SWC was fun and very informative. His major piece of advice is the same advice everyone gives, but I am actually beginning to follow: if you want to be a writer, write a lot. You can't do anything if you don't have words on a page. He will be a good resource once I finish some words on pages, though. Thank you Scott!

I also need to fill up my list of ideas for projects, stories, etc. That will help on the days when I just can't look at the book anymore.

m

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Cal confronts her ex

Daily word count: 1,055
Weekly word count: 2,061

Cal gets to confront her ex at a rally because he's the environmental policy counsel for the Democrats. She's mostly terrified during the encounter, but manages to get through it and parse it later on. This ought to free her up for a relationship that I've imagined for her later in the book.

One thing I like about these characters is that all of them are strong women who are still vulnerable on the inside. As Dr. Elliot Reid says on Scrubs, "Every woman still has that self-conscious teenage girl inside her." I watch too much TV. :)

Tomorrow, I'll have coffee with a writer friend who's been published...multiple times! It's tempting to squeeze all the information he has about publishing and agents, etc., out of him, but I don't really need that now. I need a writer friend to commiserate with. It'll be fun.

m

Monday, January 19, 2009

Character sketches

daily word count : 1,006
weekly word count: 1,006

I was listening to a podcast episode of Pen On Fire (search for it on iTunes). It's a podcast where the host interviews writers, publishers, editors, etc. about the trade, so to speak. She does poetry, fiction, non-fiction writers. This time, the author had written a novel, and was talking about how she liked writing character sketches because she liked to see "what characters do when I'm not looking."

I really liked that, so I've done a bit of back story on the character Calliope Talmadge. I gave her a hippie/activist ex-husband who left her for a nubile Brazilian who also wanted to save the rainforest.

So far, so good.
m

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Heckuva week

Daily total (Tuesday): 1,031
Weekly total: 1,031

Do not taunt Murphy. Just as you would not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

We had an animal get sick on us over the weekend, and she had to go to the hospital. She's fine now, but that was a tense time. Plus playoffs and some personal issues, no more writing has been done.

Writing my goal and editing Tuesday night felt really, really good. I like that feeling.

Tonight, I decided to work on our alpaca podcast instead (www.pacatalk.com). It's been hanging over my head for so long, I wanted to finish it. I'm nearly done.

Off to bed! Maybe a little editing will get done under the covers. It could happen.
m

Friday, January 9, 2009

Murphy gets in the way...

Hmph. I'm not making it to 5,000 words this week.

(whiny excuse alert!)

My gym locker and car were broken into on Wednesday, and I had a meeting on Thursday night, so I didn't write either of those days. I will try to make words up this weekend, but I'm not hopeful.

(Unbridled optimism alert!)

Murphy (of Murphy's Law) likes to get in the way of new projects. I'm undaunted, though. Murphy has a short attention span, and next week will be better. Ha!

take that Murphy.

m

Monday, January 5, 2009

The last chapter?

daily word count: 1,099
weekly word count: 3,371

Did I really just write the last chapter of Liz A. Stratton Closes the Store?

Well, I wrote the last chapter of ONE of the POSSIBLE endings of this book. I like the ending, although I admit I stole the concept for the peace deal from an episode of The Simpsons, although originally, it wasn't an idea of how to create peace, but for how too many diseases make you invincible.

I think I'm going to live with this ending for a while and see how it sits. I really need to flesh it out. As it is, I've basically just written a framework, which needs some filling in before it's "done." I can't wait to start editing this book into a daft I can actually show people.

Of course, editing doesn't count towards the 5,000 new words a week goal I've set for myself, so I need to think of something to write for tomorrow. I'll bet there are more words in this project that need writing.

I guess I need to make a list of project to work on. That can wait for tomorrow. :)

g'night.
m

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Playoffs foil me

daily word count : 1,162
weekly word count: 2,272

I've decided that my "week" will be counted from Sunday to Saturday, so that I may plan on spending Friday and Saturday nights not writing, but watching Netflix with my husband (This week was Throne of Blood by Kurosawa, a Japanese Samurai version of Macbeth. Awesome in so many ways).

I'm seeing that my plans may be further complicated by the fact that football playoffs are going on right now, and I feel compelled to watch them. This is true even though I don't have a personal investment in any team that made it to the playoffs this year, positive or negative.

In Closes the Store, Liz and company have figured out some preposterous way to end the conflict in the Middle East that doesn't involve wife-swapping. Actually, I have to finalize what they are doing, but I think that's best done by sleeping on it.

School starts tomorrow, though I don't start teaching classes until Tuesday. I was able to write 1,667 words a day during Nano, even with papers to grade. I know I'll be tempted to fudge on writing during the quarter, but if I can do it during Thanksgiving, I can do it now.

Yay, pep talk!
m

Thursday, January 1, 2009

The end of "Liz Stratton Closes the Store"

Daily word count: 1,110
Weekly word count: 1,1110

I am working on the "endings" of my NaNoWriMo novel Liz A. Stratton Closes the Store. The book is a re-telling of Aristophanes's play Lysistrata, in which a group of women decide that in order to end a war, they should withhold sex from their husbands. It's a comedy, so the plan works.

In Liz, Liz A. Stratton is a talk show host who decides to run for President of the United States, and inadvertently calls for a sex strike to end the war.

The problem with the ending is that I know that the war ends, but I don't know if Liz wins the election. So, I'm writing it both ways: one winning and one losing.

Actually, I began with a three-way tie because I thought it would be interesting to explore what happens when that happens. It isn't interesting. It goes to Congress and they decide. I knew I had to stop writing that version when I realized how badly the character Liz didn't want to go to Washington D.C. and lobby for herself that way. She would have lost that battle. So those pages are in the round file.

Now I'm working on the "losing" version. I think we're going to the Middle East because women over there have begun protesting. I know, far-fetched, huh? We'll see how it goes.

m

The world doesn't need this...

Yet another writer who feels the need to be accountable to someone, even it if is equivalent to telling the void my daily wordcount.

However, I DO feel the need to be accountable, so here we are.

This is all NaNoWriMo's fault. I took part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in Nov. 2008, and I WON. This means that I wrote 50,000 words of a new novel in 30 days. That's 1,667 words a day, for those of you who are math blockheads like me.

This accomplishment has shown me that I am capable of producing book-length works, if I put in the time. This means that my guilt for NOT putting in the time is magnified by quite a lot. Hence the blog.

My strategy is twofold. First, I have resolved to produce 5,000 new words a week, or 1,000 words a day for each weekday. On top of that, I resolve to post my word counts and travails here so that I can at least keep track. Plus, I have found that I problem solve when I write, so this will be a place where I can "think on paper," and have it stored handily so when I look for it later, I don't give up as soon as I confront my scary file cabinet or box of old journals.

This may prove useful someday to someone other than myself, but that's a secondary function here. If someone asks me a question, the writing teacher in me will try to answer it, but mostly, this is going to be a place for my musings.

Let me know if any of you have writing questions or questions about my work. If all goes as planned, I'll be updating this quite frequently.

love to all
maren