Favorite vampire books

What would be your favorite vampire books, or the vampire books you would consider the best of the genre, if you were asked?  This article, The Five Greatest Vampire Novels Written in the Last 100 Years, gives a few great ones.  Sadly, I've only read one on the list (Interview with the Vampire -- the one that began my addiction to the genre), but I'm interested in reading some of the others, especially the last one, Let the Right One In.  I've seen the Swedish movie and loved it, although I haven't seen the American version yet.

What would be on your list if you were to write a similar article?

Camp NaNoWriMo fail

Despite my excitement for having finally started working on my Camp NaNo novel during my vacation week, I never got back to work on it after that first night.

I'm disappointed, but I did get a lot else done that week.  However, I am now faced with the dilemma of how to reintroduce working on my fiction every day with my new, busier schedule.

My first hour of work on my novel

Finally, 22 days into Camp NaNoWriMo, I put my first hour of work into my project for this month.

It was more difficult than I'd expected.  I woke up with no motivation today, perhaps from being on vacation.  I finally got going on some client work in the afternoon, and got into quite a routine of writing my client's blog posts, working on those until my motivation started flagging again -- too many posts in one day, I'm sure.

From there, the plan was to work on my novel, but I couldn't even wrap my head around how I was going to get started.

Bestselling books in the 1920s

Yesterday I never got around to working on my novel.  It still remains to be seen whether I will manage to do so today, but in the meantime, here is a fun article on the bestselling books of the 1920s.

Do you recognize any of the titles?  The only one I recognize is The Sheik -- the movie was referenced in some of the books I read about the 1920s during my research phase, so I watched it.  I found The Sheik streaming online for free (the music track isn't original) thanks to Archive.org.

I'm tempted to read some of these books, especially The Mysterious Rider, The Sheik, and The Plastic Age.  Nothing shows you what the 20s were like better than reading or watching actual literature and movies from the time!

Getting started on Camp NaNoWriMo (finally)

I am off work all this week -- except for my freelance work, of course -- so the plan is to get my articles out of the way and get to work on my novel at last.  And with eleven days left of Camp NaNoWriMo!  Better late than never, right?

I have some ideas I'm tossing around in my head as to how I want to handle the rest of the month, especially my word count goal.

In the blink of an eye...

...Camp NaNoWriMo is nearly half over, and I've achieved exactly nothing.

I blogged at the beginning of July, right after Camp NaNo started, and at the time I was feeling so optimistic I was planning on raising my word count goal.  I did end up raising it, from 10,000 words to 30,000 words, with the intention of working on it for at least an hour every day -- and counting each hour of revisions and timeline work as 1,000 words.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

July session of Camp NaNoWriMo begins!

Yesterday was the first day of the July session of Camp NaNoWriMo.  My NaNo friends and I held our own little mini-kickoff at IHOP, and although they had varying levels of productivity, I was not productive at all -- at least not on my novel.