NaNoWriMo begins tonight!

NaNoWriMo starts tonight!  I was originally planning on attending the kickoff party, but now I'm not sure if I will.  I've been fighting off a cold and feeling rather tired all week, and considering I have to get up early tomorrow morning, I'm not sure if staying out until 2pm tonight is really a good idea.  I do plan to start writing from home at the stroke of midnight, however; I'll put in 30 minutes or an hour, and get that head start on my word count before I go to bed.

Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo this year?

Back from Chicago

Last week my husband and I went to Chicago.  We took the train there and back, which meant one night on the train each way, and three nights actually in Chicago.  Our primary reason for going was so that I could see the city, which I'd never seen before -- I figured if I'm going to be writing about it, I ought to at least see it!

While we were there, we rode the el, visited a couple of former speakeasies, took the architectural boat tour and rode the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, and went to the Field Museum.  We also walked around the Loop and a few other areas, and I chose a neighborhood for Ruby's and Genevieve's apartment.

It was a busy but fun three days, and while in Chicago I was very excited about incorporating some of my new experiences into my novels when I got back.  Right now I'm feeling a bit of post-vacation laziness, but I know I will find the motivation to start work on my novel tomorrow night at the NaNoWriMo kickoff party!

It's almost NaNoWriMo time again!

I haven't updated this blog in a while, but I've still been working on my novels.  I did a round of minor revisions to Pandora's Box in June and July, and marked the novel for where I want to add or do major rewrites of scenes.  And in August, I wrote the first half of Book 2, thanks to Camp NaNoWriMo.

(On my books page, I've added the cover for Book 2, but I think I will be changing the title, which is currently shown as Ruby Ransome and Prometheus's Flame.  As I write the novel, it's taking a slightly different course than I expected, and I think the plot elements that go along with the "Prometheus's Flame" bit will have to be shifted back to Book 3.  So for now, I am simply calling the novel Book 2.)

The plan for NaNoWriMo next month is to finish Book 2 -- I have just over 50k right now, and I feel like I'm halfway-ish, so hopefully I'll be able to put in another 50k during November.  But if not, I am planning on writing some of the scenes I am adding to the first book and using those as word count in November.

And in the meantime, I have a little additional research and planning to do!

Revising... and revising... and revising...

I got a little behind on revisions early in the week when I had to finish an article in time for a deadline instead.  (I am not freelancing as much as I used to, but I still am a little -- together with my busy summer schedule, it seems I may have less time for my novel than I'd planned.)  It was like that one day of doing nothing on my novel got me back out of the habit, and I've been struggling with it ever since.  I do work on it every day, but usually I only mark up a page or part of a page, either because I run out of time or I run out of patience.

Initially I didn't think revising was very hard, but I no longer feel that way.  On the surface the job doesn't seem difficult, but after revising even a page I often feel drained.  It's mentally taxing to cut up your own work like that, to read and analyze and be so focused on perfection (or as near to it as I can get).

I have a lot else to do this weekend, babysitting and working around the house; also, since the hard drive in my netbook died last week and had to be replaced, I have to work on setting up that computer all over again, and also setting up my old Averatec laptop to be used on a more regular basis.  In the midst of all this, though, I am going to try to knock out 30 pages or so of my novel manuscripts.  My normal goal for the month of June is 10 pages per day, so this will be a drop in the bucket compared to what I should be at this point (90 pages tonight as opposed to the 26 pages I'm actually at), but it will still go a long ways toward getting me back on track!

Beginning revisions

Camp NaNo has done it: It has broken the research barrier.  I've been putting off revisions of Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box for months, until that illusive day comes to pass that I've finished all my research.  But under pressure to show some progress on the June session of Camp NaNo, despite the fact that it's not actually word count progress, I've started revisions anyway.  After all, I've done enough research to have an idea of what I want to add, so as I go through the novel I can just put in place markers for what I still need to finish researching.  For the majority of the revisions, though, research just isn't necessary.

Although I'd intended to focus my first round of revisions on the story and the history, I've found that I can't stop myself from marking up the text.  Things just jump out of at me, and I can't ignore it when I don't like a word choice, or phrasing, or a passage of description or dialogue.  So I mark it up.

So far, most pages look like this:

 

Please forgive the poor picture quality, but I don't think there's a way to take a screen shot on my Nook, and that's where I'm doing my revisions.  I'm doing them the way Stephen King suggests in On Writing -- reading through the entire manuscript, marking it up, and then going back in the actual file and making the changes -- but instead of lugging around the actual manuscript, I'm doing it in a PDF annotator app on my Nook.

But as you can see, the page is filled with orange boxes and text annotations.  (I chose the color orange to make it stand out readily without having the disapproving tone that red mark-ups tend to imply.)  It will be interesting to see how revisions go in this fashion.  I've never been a big one for revising -- with my blog posts and articles, I tend to revise as I go along, and then go back through one last time for revisions once the piece is written -- so revising a novel is pretty new for me, and I'm kind of figuring things out as I go along.

How do you do revisions?  Do you find this stage to be harder or easier than the actual writing stage?  I thought it would be harder for me, because I'm basically going back through my work and tearing it up, but I wrote it so long ago (and I'm more mature as a writer now, too, I think) that it doesn't feel as personal as it did when I was writing fiction in high school and college.  In fact, I think it's easier in a lot of ways, because it has already been written, it's already there; all I have to do is make it better!

The first session of Camp NaNoWriMo begins!

Camp NaNoWriMo started last night at midnight!  This is done a little differently than the usual NaNoWriMo in the fall -- it seems to be more relaxed, for one thing, and doesn't seem to have any of the official kick-off parties and meetings and write-ins.  Instead, you are assigned to a "cabin" with 3 to 5 other people, and you have a message board for communicating with one another.  You also have separate novel pages for both June and August -- since there is a session of Camp NaNo going on each of those two months.

All 3 of my other camp members started writing last night, and they are each at least a thousand words into their novels.  I'm doing things a little differently, as I mentioned in my blog post the other day -- I'll be revising November's novel this month, and writing its sequel in August.  I haven't actually started working on revisions yet, though I plan to this evening when I meet up with my local NaNo group -- most of us have known one another for years, thanks to NaNo, and although our meeting isn't official, we've all been meeting each week since November!

Wish me luck!

The importance of backing up your work

I had a scary experience this week that is worth sharing.

If you write at all, be sure to back up frequently.  I used to, back when I used a computer that had a habit of crashing frequently, but I got complacent when I got my new computer.  So when the hard drive failed the other day with no warning, I hadn't backed up in three or four months.

I haven't worked on my novel since the last time I backed up, so I knew the first draft was safe, but there were some outlining and research notes and other various additions, such as images, that I would lose.  I actually would have lost more of my other work, my freelance writing that I do for clients, but of course if I had been avidly working on my novel more of it would have been at risk.

I lucked out: Although the hard drive was shot, the data was still recoverable.  I didn't end up actually losing anything, much to my relief.  But hopefully I've learned from my mistake, and will start backing up regularly again.

Hopefully you can learn from my mistake, too.  Especially if you haven't backed up in a while, back up now!