November 1st- NaNoWriMo Begins- Essentials

One of the essentials I've always had on hand during NaNo is snacky things, especially AFTER I quit smoking 3 years ago. Usually it was gum, mini candy bars, especially Reeses cups and chocolate in most any other form, etc. I mean, really, the day after Trick-or-Treat- who doesn't have some candy just lying about all over the house? I have kids and even if they hide it, I'm like a bloodhound, with a nose for the sweets. I can sniff it out, Sherlock Holmes style.

This time around though, I thought I'd curb the chocolate, which I could probably demolish in the first few DAYS of NaNo and instead opted for some old-fashion candies- Chick-O-Stick, Bit O'Honey and Mary Janes. I also snagged some Laffy Taffy because I can suck on a piece of that for quite some time and be happily typing away without realizing it.

But I also grabbed some Brach's Maple Nut Goodies, Trolli's Peachie O's, my all-time favorite chewy Twizzlers and Gummi Bears. Now mind you, I've come to realize that I prefer Gummi Worms to Gummi Bears and you might ask why- well, the bears seem tougher to me and after a while, I just kind of get tired of picking arms and legs out of my teeth. I don't have that problem with worms, as they have no arms or legs to speak of. ;)

On top of the sweet treats, I've also got honey roasted peanuts and this weekend's grocery day, I intend to find some Chex Mix to add those into cause occasionally I do need something salty. I've also got some knock-off Teddy Grahams as well. In the fridge we have fruit cups and string cheese, and I'm pretty sure I have some microwave popcorn, too, so I don't think I'll be at a loss for things to nibble on.

Truth is, the supply is great and I will eat some of it, but often times I find myself so deep into the writing, once I really get going, that I forget I even have the snacky foods around. In the meantime, I guess my bedroom will just have to smell of all the sweet treats and old-fashion aromas of a candy shoppe as I step on the gas pedal and gun it down this writing highway.

I probably won't be around much today as I hope (fingers & toes crossed) that I will blow my word count out of the water and get a LOT written but I will try to update word count on my Widget in the side bar each day. Hope you get off to a great start if you're participating in NaNo as well!

What snacky items, if any, do you like to keep on hand as you write- during NaNo or any other time? Would love to hear from you! Leave a comment below and tell me about your favorites!

Taryn Raye's Writerly Wednesday~ Surfing & NaNo

Yesterday I avoided the computer altogether while I tackled Mt. Dirty Laundry, hemmed a raveled seam on one of my daughter's shirts by hand and read a couple of books about surfing on my my Kindle. Honestly, I think I need the time away from the computer every once in a while to clear my head and find inner balance.

 (image from morguefile.com)

In regard to my research, I know reading about surfing is far from having experience with it, but as a writer who lives no where near the coast, I'm making do with the sources I have and honestly think I've gathered several great ideas for scenes for Mark and Alexa in my upcoming WIP that I'll be writing next month.

As of today, we're a mere week and a day away from NaNoWriMo. Am I excited? HECK YEAH! The closer we get and the more I read, the more exhilarated I feel.

Of course, that means, I'm stepping back from prepping Love by Design for publication, so I can concentrate on writing Heart of the Surf and putting a finish on this 2nd book series. I have plot lines and tweaking for LBD, that I'll work on after I come through NaNo on the other side.

Reading the books on surfing is really fueling my excitement for NaNo to begin for sure, though now that I'm researching and learning more about it, I'm also seeing more on television, especially the sad news of the surfer who was killed by a shark off the coast of California. That caught my attention last night on the news because my story is set on the California coastline and that could be a real issue, but I don't think I'm going to be writing a shark into the story.

Normally surfing is not my normal fare of interest, but I'm eager to see the new Chasing Mavericks movie, starring Gerard Butler. Of course, Mr. Butler is a mighty fine reason to watch ANY movie, but I'm finding myself interested in learning more about surfing, too, though I might never step a foot in the ocean.

Mind you, I love Gidget, but this has gotten me to thinking about other movies that might help give me a clearer, more modern idea visually— Point Break & Soul Surfer are a couple I need to get so I can watch them. Even Surf's Up is recommended viewing by one of the authors of one of the books I read about surfing.

Over the next few weeks I'm also intent on checking out the vast amount of surfing videos on Youtube, such as this one-

I find it's often easy for me to plunk myself down in another world and experience other things vicariously through words and visuals. Such is the blessings of being a writer and an avid reader.

Hope you have a great and wonderful Hump Day!

I can see the weekend from here!

#Writerly Wednesday Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2012

Yep, I'm doing it. I announced it a couple of weeks ago, but decided to make it official on the blog seeing as I only have approximately 2 weeks to get my head wrapped around the idea. This shouldn't be intimidating, considering I've done and won 5 NaNos before, but after skipping last year because I was deep in edits before Castaway Hearts came out this past April, I'm feeling a bit nervous about rejoining the ranks of fellow writers on this journey into 30 days of writing insanity.

Well, I have to admit, I'm nervous, but I'm eager, too. I haven't written "new" in what seems like forever and I'm chomping at the bit to get started. There's a current of excitement rippling under the surface, revving my engine and getting me charged with writing energy that I haven't felt in a long time. I know I burned out a while back, so writing has not been a top priority on my list, but it needs to be.

I was tired, yes...tired of writing because I burned through so much midnight oil in such a short amount of time that I needed to recover. Three years of almost non-stop writing took its toll, but that doesn't mean I haven't THOUGHT about writing almost CONSTANTLY. It eats away at me that I haven't produced much more than a few paragraphs here and there, finished a manuscript, but still feel I've come up short of my own expectations.

I'm hoping this year's NaNo will be the kindling I need to reignite the writing fire in my tummy and set me ablaze! This was, for 5 years, a very big part of my November- the crazed writing and chewing on Twizzlers and popping gum and guzzling lots of caffeine. It's a good thing I have a very understanding husband, who will cheer me on each evening when he gets home by checking to see how many words I've pummeled onto the screen. I used to not have his support, but he's quite the cheerleader for me these days.

If anyone needs a writing buddy, or just someone to talk to, bounce ideas off of or just give you a good swift kick to get you going again, I'm here, so feel free to leave me comments on the blog or email me, find me at www.nanowrimo.org and add me as a buddy. As someone who's wrestled this bear called NaNo before, I can promise you that it's worth it. You can defeat those 50,000 words and you can come out the other side with a little something to show for it. Of course, afterwards, you'll have to untie your internal editor and let her/him get to work cleaning up the drivel, but YES, it's totally worth the craziness of doing National Novel Writing Month!

Come join me!

WIPlash Wednesdays- Questions from Mary Ellen & Katie

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

~E.L. Doctorow~

Mary Ellen T.- Is your book about your life or someone you may know? I wonder how you can put everything together for a book.

Everything I write is fiction, so no, my book, nor any others I release, will be about my life or anyone I know. As a writer I know that parts of who I am, and those I love, are woven into the fabric of the story, but I never write myself or others intentionally. I do think it just comes with the territory that, as a writer, our stories are who we are, without ever meaning to be because they come from the heart of us.

(the 2nd half of Mary Ellen's comment also kind of blends into Katie's below)
Katie M.- Do your plots just come to you?

Putting together a story for me is rather free form. Sometimes plots come to me freely, spinning out off something I heard, saw or imagined. Some of those ideas percolate in my dreams, but being I'm a pantser (write by the seat of my pants), I don't plot or outline the stories in great detail.

In 2006, when I first started writing with the serious intentions of getting published, pretty much every story I had started with bare bones- character names, a general idea about what they do for a living, how they might get thrown together, what kind of conflict could exist between them and a tentative title.

All the stories I've written so far stem from those. In truth, I'm still working on writing all the ideas I already have jotted down and it hasn't been until more recently that several ideas sprung from the well I thought was dry. The only problem is that until I finish some of my others, the new ones have to be put on the back burner.

How did the new ones come to me? I fell asleep one night with all the thoughts racing in my mind and when I woke up they were still there, burning into my brain, so I wrote them down. Doesn't happen often, but I figured it was worth taking notes. Some have followed me to bed and taken their sweet time to congeal over long periods. The majority of them though, I wrote in a month, taking my cue from my participation in NaNoWriMo- conforming my writing patterns to nailing down the first rough draft within 30 days. I tend to produce a lot more when I work under such tight self-imposed deadlines.

How do you keep all the back stories straight?

Keeping the back stories straight is usually pretty easy. I don't outline, but I do usually keep a list of all characters, main and secondary, in a notebook wherein I also keep track of how scenes play out, how characters are connected (family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances- I've even jotted a sketchy-at-best family tree, just to make sense of how many siblings there are), how long the chapters run, and make notes of things to come as I'm writing or even research I've done online for certain things like preparation of certain meals or dishes or decorating jargon, rodeo information, the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Grauman's Chinese Theater, or when the match came into existence, etc.

For Castaway Hearts, I was halfway through the story when I wondered if matches even existed in the late 1700s. A quick search on Bing found my answer.

Friction matches, were first invented by an English chemist in 1826, so no, my character couldn't light pipe tobacco from a match. So what did they do to start a fire? Before friction matches, also known as lucifer matches, men lit their pipes with a paper spill or carried a tinderbox with them for lighting their tobacco. This was a much more time consuming habit, but I knew I had a few places in the story where I needed to remove the match lighting and give a little insight into what would have been the norm in that bygone time.

Story timelines, most especially for those that play out in chronological order are definitely something I need to police myself over a little more. I realized at the end of January while reading through to finish my current WIP, that a secondary character, who was pregnant in a previous book, would have been due in March, but when the WIP started, it was already May, but she was due anytime...I kept thinking, wait...2 months OVERDUE? That's just not possible! And so I had to fix it. And then there's the whole, "did that couple get married in the last book, or are they getting married in this one?"

It's a juggling act, to say the least, but something I enjoy tremendously.

Thanks for the questions ladies! Tune in next week for a question from Joey R.

Feel free to leave me more questions in the comments here at anytime.
I'll be happy to answer them.

Happy Hump Day! I can see the weekend from here!

1st Day of NaNoWriMo

It started off typical, of course. I would swear that the past several years I've done NaNo have always started similarly. I was absolutely FINE on Saturday and felt great. Had fun dressing up for Halloween and whatnot, but when I woke up Sunday morning, I was SICK AS A DOG! It's like my body KNOWS it's NaNo time and wants to throw an extra monkey wrench into my plans.

I had an itchy sore throat and a stuffed up head. I felt miserable and couldn't concentrate at all. I spent the better part of the morning taking care of things around the house that I knew weren't going to do themselves (and no one else would lift a finger to do them either)- emptied the litterbox and bathroom trash, the kitchen trash (which hubby did take out to the trash can for me)- started all the laundry that needed doing and put up more that I had folded but set aside. I changed the bedsheets and did the dishes and made overnight coleslaw, but by lunch time, I was feeling far worse than I had when I got up.

I did sit down here and try to write, but the story refused to get going...I couldn't get past "Chapter One." I ate tomato soup and a grilled cheese and ham and still sat here, hoping inspiration would strike.

Instead I found myself dozing off and my head getting heavier and heavier until I finally gave it up and lay down in the bed and slept restlessly for several hours. I took a couple of those NyQuil pills for cold and flu, but that seemed to make me feel worse.

I got up around 4 pm to find hubby mixing up a bag of chocolate chip cookies and insisting that he could fix the kids a sandwich instead of me having to cook. I still heated up chicken noodle soup for myself and ate that. Felt a little better, so I gave my daughter her bath and decided that perhaps I could get something from reading the last few chapters of my previous novel, which is connected- the heroes are brothers from one story to another.

Well, it must have helped some because at 7:30, after the kids were put to bed, I started chapter one and nearly had it finished by 9 when hubby and I go to bed. I made my minimum goal for the day. As most NaNo'ers know, you need to write at least 1,667 words a day in order to hit 50K by the 30th. Of course, if you get on a role, you can get ahead some, but I did get 1,684 written last night and that was good enough for a sick woman. LOL

This morning, I'm back at it, hoping to keep my nose to the grindstone since my total goal isn't just 50K but to finish the novel will at least 81K OR around 400 pages. So there you go. I'm already up to 2,140 words this morning so I'm moving along.

Best of luck to everyone else participating!

NaNo's still going and so is my story...

This novel I did for NaNo this year may well be the shortest of my novels. I feel the end of the story looming closer than I did with the others. It's like that impending feeling you get when you're wrapped up in a movie and don't realize it's almost the end, until it is the end.

My other novels all ran somewhere around 70-80K. This one feels like another 10K could finish it off at 60K. Not sure yet. I know this is just first draft, so it's not like revisions, editing, dumping some things and adding others couldn't bump the word count though. I'm sure when I go back and start reading it I'll find empty spots and realize-

Oops! I meant to mention this or include this scene...

Or it needs beefing up here or toning down there....

The argument didn't last long enough...

But then neither did the love scene....

LOL

Plot holes.

They're kind of like potholes. You HAVE to fill them in with good concrete or asphalt, or the story is going to be like a bumpy ride down a neglected highway. The reader isn't going to want to travel that road again (or any other road you've fashioned) if you don't make sure they have a smooth ride, enjoy the scenery and come to the end of the road and look back and say- "You know what...I'd like to travel that road again someday."

When I love a book, it's because I enjoyed the journey, didn't crash my car into any "plot"holes or find myself grimacing or grabbing at the dash to steady myself during the trip. And a good book will take you smoothly from start to finish. You'll say "That's a keeper" and you'll put that book on a shelf so that you can drive that road again in the future.

It's a beautiful thing.

Hope everyone has a wonderful Wednesday! We're over the hump!

50,008K/50,000

Revving up for NaNo

Last year I participated for the first time in National Novel Writing Month and I succeeded in reaching the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. I actually finished my novel by the end of November and I was proud and exhilarated.

See, I had previously been working on my 1st novel sporadically over the past decade or so. Life had always been too busy, too hectic, to finish it, but I had finally finished it at the end of September of last year. I was just thrilled I had finally completed my first draft of my first novel after struggling with it for ten years off and on.

It was shortly after that I found out about NaNoWriMo. The process intrigued me- write a 50k novel in 30 days! Impossible!

Or so I thought.

NaNo is truly a challenge with yourself. Of course you can chat with others, have discussions and whatnot on their forums, but it's not really a competition against others. It tests your own skills and pits you against your own fears and doubts, hopes and dreams. When I read up on what it was all about, I knew I had to do it. I mean, in all honesty, I thought it would take me ten years to write any novel. Look at how long it took to write my first one! LOL

But last November I made an amazing discovery about myself. I CAN write that much, if not moreso, in 30 days. Given a deadline made all the difference I believe. I wrote and finished the first draft of my 2nd novel during NaNo last year.

Of course, the high speed race to finish did leave me with brain drain for a couple of months after and I was going through a lot of stuff personally as well toward the end of the year last year. I've come a long way since then. Somewhere between Feb and April, I was blessed with an overflow of novel ideas.

I was also damned to almost insufferable pain with my teeth, but once that was over and I was back to myself, back to feeling "normal," I dug in, picked one of my favorite novel ideas that I just knew I had to write. I wrote and finished my 3rd novel between the middle of July and the middle of August.

Once I was done with that, I went back and did some major overhaul to my 1st novel- revisions, editing out stuff that just didn't fit, adding things that seemed to enhance the story. I've been participating in the Coffee Write story on Coffee Time Romance's forums and also including my "Arms of the Right Man" on here as a "blog novel." I call it my blog novel because I don't foresee ever submitting it to an agent or publisher, just something to play around with, testing my writing chops out in the open, which is taking a step outside my comfort zone. I rarely share anything I've written outside of family/friends. (BTW, any feedback, advice, or comments are welcome).

So now the time of NaNo is upon us again and I've got my novel idea picked out and I'm anxious to get started...but can't until November 1st. If I succeed again at writing and finishing a 50k+ novel again this year, I will have 4 novels written. Last night I started going through my printed manuscript of my novel from last year's NaNo, doing revisions- marking and highlighting changes I feel are necessary to the story.

I'm trying to distract myself from thinking about my NaNo novel for this year. It makes my fingers tingle at the idea of getting started. So for now I'll not think about it. Or try not to.

Have a great day. I will be posting the 6th installment of Arms of the Right Man later.