A measly 210 words yesterday. But I had a lovely day, which really should count for something. The Food & Wine Festival was perfect–beautiful weather, delicious food, terrific level of people. Some of the food stands had no lines at all and none of them had such long lines that I immediately lost interest in the food, which has happened before.

However not drinking alcohol for three months meant that a couple glasses of wine, followed by a flute of champagne, went straight to my head. I was buzzed when we got home and not at all inclined to get back to writing. Instead, I played with the dogs and went to bed early. Then proceeded to not sleep. I woke up congested and coughing, alas. I knew I would, but it’s the price I chose to pay for my yesterday.

Today I am going to write, but I think I’m going to try a new strategy. Since Ghosts, I’ve never written out of order. With Ghosts, the first things I wrote were actually the sex scene and the scene with the little boy and the swing, but I wound up seriously having to rewrite them, because they didn’t fit in the final book the right way. I decided then not to do that again, especially because keeping track of my Word documents got difficult. But I’m using yWriter for this project and it’s designed for that kind of flexibility. It will be really easy to mix and match scenes as I need to. So today and tomorrow, I’m going to be trying to write whatever comes to me, whatever scene is in my head, without worrying about the linear direction of the book. I’m hoping that writing that way will get me some higher word counts, instead of getting stuck when I have to make important decisions. (Example of said decisions: who can understand a ghost whose native language is Arabic? Does Akira speak all languages of all ghosts? Do ghosts understand one another automatically?)

Goal for today: eh. Lots of words but without pressuring myself? That feels like a good goal. But it’s Day 8 and if I’m going to hit the finish line, it’s time for a couple really good word count days. I hope Cam and Grace will oblige!

I have realized a weakness in my writing: a weakness that I’ve sort of occasionally stumbled across now and again but that hit me again yesterday while I was also coincidentally engaged in falling down an internet rabbit hole of the highest order.

I can’t write arguments.

Real arguments, the kind where tempers flare, heated words are exchanged, people storm off in a huff, maybe some dishes get thrown. I’ve done a few fight scenes now and those have gotten easier for me, but I’m not talking about hero(ine) vs villain scenes here. I’m talking real people getting angry at each other. I don’t know how to write it. Probably because I don’t know how to do it very well, either.

If you can guess from this that yesterday’s writing didn’t go so well, kudos to you. 500 words and I mostly stopped trying when 11:30 rolled around and I knew that any more words were going to end up being tomorrow (today)’s words.

The internet rabbit hole was hours and hours of distraction, reading about a SF author who presented as young, sweet, and new to the scene and who was recently revealed to be a long-time (well over a decade), destroyer-of-communities, virulent troll. Fascinating reading although so saddening. Words can do so much damage. (If you want to fall into this rabbit hole, my starting place was Jim Hines blog. But it’s not a feel-good story in any way, so you might want to skip it.)

Anyway, the combination of struggling to write a fight scene while reading about someone who aggressively destroyed people’s happiness through her words has left me really thoughtful. Part of me thinks, hmm, I really need to get better at this. A larger part of me thinks, yeah, not interested. I do believe that anger can be constructive. I also think that I’m going to keep my characters–at least the ones that I want the readers to empathize with–smart, mature people who don’t resort to screaming and name-calling. So today’s plan becomes some reworking of the scene I was struggling with. Maybe the reason I couldn’t write it is because that’s not where the story wanted to go.

Today’s bigger plan: one last trip to Epcot’s Food & Wine Festive. I’m still going to try to squeeze some writing in, before and after, but it’s a gorgeous day to wander around the world, eating foods that are very much out of my diet, and appreciating life.

NaNoWriMo does make it awfully easy to think of titles for blog posts. I’m going to call that one of its virtues. The other is definitely how much house-cleaning I’m doing. I’m not sure why the writer guilt of not getting enough words done is driving me to complete all the household chores that I’ve been ignoring for months and sometimes years, but it is, and my house is probably happy for it. Yesterday, I scrubbed my tub, reorganized the bathroom counters, vacuumed my bedroom, bathroom, living room and dining room, changed the sheets on my bed, did more laundry, including folding and putting it away and today I’ve already started organizing the garage to take a load of stuff to the Goodwill drop off. Yes, just past 8AM and I’ve been working in the garage already. Writing words already? Not so much.

I broke 800 words yesterday–less than half of the total needed to reach my goals. And I greatly fear that when I read them today I am going to hate them. I was writing in the point of view of my male character and really struggling with his voice. I have a clear picture of him in my head and it’s competing with my notions of what a hero in a romance novel is supposed to be. I need to keep reminding myself that it’s a first draft, and if I get the words down first, I can fix them later, but it’s hard. I want to get him right. I want him to be the guy that my imagination sees him as while also being appealing to my reader. I think I need to trust myself more, though. And maybe trust my readers, too. Cam’s first appearance should show that he has a sense of fun. I hope it will carry him through a current period of angst-y torment and somewhat asshole-ish behavior without alienating the audience. Or me, for that matter.

Anyway, onwards I go. I am hoping for a solid word count today, but my plan is vague and my characters weren’t talking to me on my morning walk. At least not the ones I need to hear from. But I’ve got solid chunks of time today and motivation and hey, my fingers are all warmed up. Let’s see what I can do with that!

Good luck to those of you writing. I hope today is a stellar day for all of us!

I broke 5K words yesterday. Yay, me! I get the nice little NaNo badge and everything. This still does not put me on track to finish, but I’m taking my accomplishments where I can find them and this definitely felt like one.

Today… I’m off to a bad start. It was maybe the weather, maybe all the moving around of books that I did yesterday, maybe too much sitting still thinking about writing, but my joints were so unhappy in the night that I found it hard to sleep. I felt pretty resentful about it. The whole point of this crazy diet is that my joint pain is supposed to go away and last night’s pain was pretty intense. So I’m starting my day over-tired and grouchy and still in pain. I’m going to write anyway, and I’m going to try very hard not to let it affect the words. Just because I’m grumpy doesn’t mean that my characters should be. Fortunately for me, I believe I’m going to be writing the first fight for my main characters so my mood may translate nicely to the pixels.

Goal? Well, to hit 2K words and have them be great words.

Realistic goal? To end the day feeling like I’ve accomplished something, whatever that something might be. (The creamy lemon chicken kale soup that I intend to make this afternoon will not count.)

I hope you’re all doing well with your word counts, too! Or if not your word counts, that at least the words themselves are making you happy. 🙂

1201 words yesterday. At some point during the day, I gave up my grand hopes of catching up and just settled for passing 1K (my usual goal) so I’m pleased with the daily total.

I also cleared off a bunch of stuff on my to-do list including an errand that took over an hour, replacing a doorknob that had stopped turning properly, and making phone calls, so go me. Today, I’ve researched the election–gotta decide which judges to not vote for, despite the fact that they all always win re-election anyway. Even though it’s just a symbolic gesture, I always like to be sure I know what the people I’m supporting in office stand for. Today I’ll be saying no to two of them, including, alas, the only woman. And, of course, I’ll be heading off to vote this morning.

Writing-wise–I keep stumbling up against the things I don’t know. About the characters, about the plot, about the story. I said that I wasn’t a discovery writer, but I do tend to discover while I’m writing all the things I don’t know. But I start today writing from Grace’s point-of-view and I’m hoping that’ll be a little easier for me. Plus, plenty of time while standing in line at my polling place to contemplate plot twists and the events of the current chapter!

Hmm, I’m actually feeling optimistic. That’s good, I guess. I’m 3K words behind, which is still a totally achievable amount of words. I just need to keep writing!

826 words yesterday. Slightly less than half of the daily mileage I need to actually hit the 50K in a month goal.

I’m trying to tell myself that I can easily make that up, but I’m also starting to feel the anxious energy that kills me every year. So today I’m going to go to yoga and I’m going to drink herbal tea and try to relax. I will be writing, and I will be trying to reach 1670 words today, but the words that matter are today’s words, not yesterday’s.

Yesterday’s problem, though, was the same as always: I’m not a discovery writer. I’m a discovery thinker. I’ve got great things planned for this story and the fun of playing with lots of characters that I know well, but a sentence can take me a while, because it has to be the right sentence for the character. Yesterday, I wrote one great description. The hero sees Grace and thinks that her eyes are the color of army drab. Those two words took me at least an hour. But felt perfect when I was done with them. Unfortunately, two perfect words don’t add up very quickly.

This morning I realized why I was stuck with Rose and came up with her character’s conflict in this story. She likes having company around, never does see much of a need for ghosts to move on. But today I need to go back and review A Gift of Time and make sure that her character hasn’t already developed beyond that. That time will not be word creation time, but it’s important to the story.

One of my dogs is grumbling. Dreaming, maybe? Time to check on her, make myself another cup of tea, and get started. For Day Three, I’m going to try being Zen instead of being determined, because determination didn’t get me that far.

Day One of NaNo. I wrote 600 words before breakfast. Yay me! And now it’s six hours later and I’m yawning and my word count hasn’t gone up at all. Instead I’ve moved a bunch of books and some furniture around, as if neatening my environment will do the same to my mind.

*sigh*

I do know why I got stuck–two reasons that get me every time. First, I started down a wrong path. My character arrives in town and reacts by thinking that it’s a dump, a horrible little place. Nope. That’s the wrong tone for him, not who he should be. One little line and my brain dead-ends. No more words for three hours until I figure out that I’ve gone off course.

Next up, well, he’s arrived in town, never been there before, doesn’t know it… that means description. It means writing something about where he is and what he’s looking at. I should invent some special description writing practice, like some mental form of abdominal crunches, to get myself better at writing description. Not just any description, but description that satisfies me.

What I like in description is the one line that means everything. So not a list of green trees and this store and that store and lots of physical stuff, but the quick reference. Hmm, I might be getting it. (It was Main Street USA. Not the Disney version, but the real thing. Any Town, America, with faded paint and dusty windows, but businesses that looked healthy and thriving.)

Eh, I’m not really getting it. But I’m headed back to it. Knowing that I’m stuck because of description and knowing that it is NaNoWriMo adds up to — if I don’t get it, I’ll stick a placeholder in (describe his environment! throw in some contextual embedding!) and move on. I should easily be able to get 1000 words out of his arrival at Maggie’s bistro without worrying too much about how he gets there.

If you’re playing NaNo, too, I hope you’re off to a better start than I am!

Yesterday’s blog post was the only writing I managed to do yesterday. I completely and totally forgive myself.

I worked hard, without taking good breaks, and late. I managed to get both Ghosts and Thought completely updated, falling slightly in love with the process of creating an ebook in pure HTML, up until Calibre screwed with my files, and then got both books posted on (I believe) all the sites where they were originally posted. Oh, drat, I just remembered Tomely. I didn’t get there with Thought. I guess I won’t worry about that too much, since no one has ever bought a copy of a book from Tomely, but I will try to update that site later today. Oh, and my own sites–I didn’t update those either. Okay, I *almost* got done. Either way, it was a ton of work, a lot of hours spent at the computer, and I feel like it was a successful day, despite the fact that it wasn’t a word-filled day.

It was also good because I spent a lot of time proofing A Gift of Thought (because of the weird artifacts caused by some symbols) and really refreshed my memory about some of the character voices. It made me more excited to start working on A Gift of Grace, which I will be doing starting Saturday morning.

With NaNo, some people start at midnight on Halloween. I will not be doing that. But I will start first thing on Saturday and I am going to try to keep a lot of time very clear for the first week of the month. I always lose in the first week. By the end, I’m so far behind that I know I will never catch up. Not this year. I’m not going to assume that the book I write will be any good–it’ll be a fast first draft, it might need a ton of work later–but I am going to let the words pour out and have fun with them. Anytime I get stuck, my plot ninja will be to bring in one of the characters from a previous book for a scene or two. That almost feels like cheating to me, but for a character-driven author (which I very much am) having a pre-established pool of characters to play with ought to be amazing.

I am really liking my hero, too. Poor guy is tortured, but he has a sense of humor about it. Ah, but I’m not starting today!

Today, A Gift of Time gets reformatted. A person comes to look at my kitchen and give me a quote for the repairs I need in there. And my dad stops by to bring me some stuff and maybe take me out to dinner. Plus, I will wander through my house appreciating my exceedingly pretty new floors. Yesterday was a pretty noisy day and I maintained great focus. Today is going to be a quieter day, but I hope I can still keep the focus up.

As for the writing: um. Maybe finish the scene for APB that I’ve been stuck on. Maybe write another blog post and show off pictures of my pretty floor and/or my prettier book covers. Maybe… maybe these 500 words counts as writing for the day. I’ll find out by tomorrow. 🙂

Not exactly what one might call a flood, but I actually feel as if I was pretty productive with those 18 words. I think I have decided to start a new project for NaNoWriMo and I spent some time having fun plotting it. Then I managed to switch gears and think about Fen for a while. I only eked out those measly 18 words–which, I admit, I might delete today–but I also tweaked some of the words leading up to those 18 and felt generally pleased with the quality of the words on the page.

NaNo starts Saturday, so my goals for the next few days are to keep working on Fen and–more importantly–to get all of my files with their new covers posted to all of the sites that I want them to be posted on. That’s a big job and I want to finish it, not having it drag on throughout the month of November. If I can finish it by Saturday, then I go into NaNo without the lurking weight of all the things I need to take care of dragging me down. I’ve always failed NaNo grandly–within the first week, I’m thousands of words behind and wanting to spend all my time asleep, but this project would be one where I know my characters pretty well (with one exception) and a lot of the events can evolve in a very natural way. I think I might be able to really fall into it. And maybe for once the whole goal oriented nature of NaNo will work in my favor.

But still, that’s three days away. Today, I’d like to finish the scene I’ve been working on with Fen, and get Ghosts re-formatted. And now that I’ve written a blog post, maybe I’ll let myself actually get to it!