Jan

8

Well look at that.

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The word progress meter has jumped to 36k words. You know what that means? I finished Chapter 15 of TMA. I wrote just over 1200 new words today. I’m pretty sure most of them are good, but we’ll have to wait and see what my writing group has to say.

Getting this chapter done is a huge victory to me. It wasn’t a difficult one to write, but the challenge was to write at all. My kids were off school from December 19th to January 5th, when they’re home and awake, it’s impossible for me to do any kind of writing. Add to that the fact we were either traveling or recovering from traveling for about a third of that time, and that I was sick another third, there wasn’t really a lot of time for me to write.

I know that the experts say that it doesn’t matter how you feel, you should just write through it all. It’s a fine thing to say, but sometimes, it just doesn’t work. Sometimes you simply can’t write. It’s really hard to concentrate when the two saltine crackers you ate for breakfast want to leave the way they came in. So, I did what I could. I rested. I read. I did my best to clear my head of all the crap lodged in there. Oh, I did sit down and try to write each and every one of the days I was home, but I did my best not to punish myself for failing. Guilt is a good motivator, but doesn’t always give a positive result.

Chapter 15′s done and, as they say in the movies, in the can. Now there’s only one thing left to figure out: What happens in Chapter 16? :)

Feb

7

Snowy Thursday

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We had such awful weather last night. Rain turned to freezing rain turned to hail turned to snow. The freezing rain was so bad that I could see the ice on the trees on the other side of the street – and I’m about 20 feet back from the road. When the bus dropped the kids off from school, the wheels stopped but the bus kept going four or five feet before all forward movement stopped. Donovan told me that on the way home, the bus nearly hit a car because it was sliding on the road. And it took Matt two hours to drive what normally takes him 50 minutes to get home (he made a side trip – normally his commute is about 25 minutes).

On a completely different note, can you picture (or rather, can you imagine hearing) Val Kilmer as the voice of K.I.T.T? (I’m reading through all my rss feeds, and this is one story that popped up this morning.)

For those of you who follow my blog on a regular basis, you’ll have noticed a slight change. Previously, I’d had things set up to allow for up to five posts being shown on the front page. I’ve changed it to just one post, and here’s the reason why. Sometimes I write really long blog entries, kind of like this one. When I do a couple of them, the front page just gets so long it gives me the creeps. I decided that it’d be easier on my readers if I limited things to a single entry per page.

There’s also a slightly more mundane and business-like reason to this. I use Google Analytics to learn about who’s going to what pages and reading what. By seeing what posts are being read more often, I can get an idea of the kinds of things you want to learn more about or are just generally interested in. One post per page lets me narrow things down more easily.

On the WIP front, I was actually eager to open up the file and start working on Chapter 13. No, I don’t suffer from triskaidekaphobia, but it’s been a challenge to get going. I ended Chapter 12 at the end of a scene, and while I knew where the story had to go next, I didn’t know how to get it there. As usually happens, I tossed aside the perfectionism that gets in the way and started writing. I can always go back and change it when I’m doing the revisions.

Once I’ve gotten at least half of Chapter 13 done, I’m going to take a step back and do something I should have done before this point. TMA is a cross-genre novel – urban fantasy and mystery/thriller. As such, the timing of things is very important. Can you guess what it is I didn’t do?

That’s right – I didn’t figure out the timeline of events. So, that’s what I’m going to do. As I’m typing this, I’m doing a completely fresh print out of the novel. All 123 pages of it. That’s an average of 268.36 words per page, if you’re into that sort of thing. :) I’m going to go through the manuscript so far, making a note of the events that happen and when I’ve assigned a date to them. For most events, it’s along the lines of “in three days” or “on Wednesday”, but I still need to keep track of things. If I’m on Wednesday and write “in two days” then what’s happening in two days will be happening on a Friday. It’s really just a little thing to keep track of, but it’s important to maintain consistency and the flow of the story. Nothing throws a reader (or an editor) more than something happening on a Saturday that should have happened on a Monday.

Heh. See what I mean about overly long posts? :)