Month: November 2012

NaNo Winner Badge

Finished NaNoWriMo 2012

Posted on by Trina

I’ve managed to finish a draft of “The Spaceport” for NaNo! NaNo Winner Badge

This was an interesting experience. I had to fight through food poisoning, holiday planning, emotional ups and downs…and yet this was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever taken on. It took me back to my early years as a writer, when I could work with complete abandon. The quality is maybe a little better than it was back then, but not much. The story still needs a lot of editing as several characters changed significantly as the story unfolded. I need to go back and add in all of the layers of interpersonal dynamics and clean up some serious point of view issues, but it is done.

Now I need to return to real life and do things like laundry and cleaning the house.

I’ll also be pondering: could I do this on a daily basis? Because this is the pace a professional author needs to maintain in our modern world.

Graph of Nanowrimo word count

Writing by Statistical Analysis

Posted on by Trina

Graph of Nanowrimo word count

It isn’t that I’ve never tracked my word count before, but I’ve never looked at the words on a graph like THIS. I find it interesting because in plotting you want significant stages (act 1, act 2, etc.) to fall at predictable places in the story. This graph looks useful. I can see that I’m approaching a point where I should have a major turning point. Hmmm.

Why yes, I am writing this one by the seat of my pants. Fun. I haven’t done this in a long time. I have a general idea of the arc of the novel, where it is going, how it will generally end, but all of the fine details, the characters, the threads… this is a blast.

Or insanity.

Nano Day 2 — sort of

Posted on by Trina

I started 4 days late and 5000 words short, but I’m hard at work. I’m delighting in finally getting the first novel in my Spaceport series on paper. I’d written a draft of it years ago — and managed to lose it. Over the years, I became convinced that was a good thing as the entire story needed to be re-worked and re-written from scratch. Finally putting fingers to keyboard feels very healing.

Of course, this draft stinks, but that’s what it is supposed to.

Take the most awesome amusement park ever and insert — one little-green-man. What could possibly go wrong?