Less Than Two Hours To Go!

Friday, October 31, 2008

Being filled simultaneously with excitement, fear, anticipation, and dread is a very strange feeling. I'm looking for word count widgets to post here.
I'm listening to Halloween stories to take my mind off of the excitement. Seeing all the Twitter updates with everyone starting in their time zones and coming back a few hours later with their word count achieved for the day is very inspiring.

Good luck everyone!




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Less Than 24 Hours!

So I got the pumpkin carved, as you can see. The NaNoWriMo site must be down. Everytime I log onto Blogger I get a NaNo sign-in box popping up on my computer. There's usually electronic goblins floating around cyberspace on Halloween anyway, so I'm running a virus scan just to be safe.

The teleconference with Lisa Gentile this afternoon went very well. She helped me see another angle to a project I wanted to begin. She's wonderful. Lisa is a NaNoWriMo winner, and we share a love of consuming large amounts of coffee while writing.

And that's about all I accomplished today. Due to an attack of sciatica I'm sitting on a heating pad as I write this, hoping and praying it doesn't get worse. If it does, sitting at the desk will be out of the picture. And I don't need that the first day of NaNo.

Still psyched, though. Lisa's suggestions have me thinking of taking my novel in a whole new direction, possible combining the two ideas into one. That just might take the emotional edge off the project I originally intended to write. That way it won't be so overwhelming. Some of my friends have a saying, "New directions, new connections." It sounds like a good idea to me.

This time tomorrow night, we'll be doing NaNo! Yea!




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Two Days and Still Counting

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Anticipation and excitement are setting in, right alongside fear and apprehension. But I'm still psyched. I have a teleconference in the morning with Lisa Gentile, a writing coach, to see in what direction I want to go after November. I plan on submitting this novel for publication.

Plan for tomorrow:
1. Carve the pumpkin. Won't have time Friday.
2. More character development.
3. Outline scenes and chapter resolutions.
4. Start reading "No Plot, No Problem!" by Chris Baty (again!).
5. Break out the "Novel Writing Kit" my parents gave me for my birthday back in August. (Thanks Mom and Dad!)
6. Hit my regional forum on the NaNo site and check for write-ins nearby. (I can smell the Starbucks coffee already!)
7. Get out the supplies I bought back in September (notebooks, pens, candy! Yes!)
8. Watch a few more author bios on Biography.com to remind myself that at one time, they were unpublished, too. But they did it.

It's getting close! Are you ready? Am I really ready?




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Three Days and Counting

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

I'm still on the "vampire schedule" but I'm dealing with it. Did manage to do some playing around with yWriter4. It's a new program for me. My daughter loves it, though. I'm still working on character development. The forums on the site are really slow, and while it's frustrating, it helps me because I'll log off and write.

It's starting to look like I'll be flying by the seat of my pants more than I intended, but it's not something that will cause me much stress. I love writing, and this is going to be fun. And I've seriously got to stop with the contractions. Every one is a loss on the word count! ;)




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Four Days and Counting

Monday, October 27, 2008

After working nights in factories and hospitals for over twenty years, my body does not want to sleep at night. I did fairly well last week, and then over the weekend flipped back to what I call "the vampire schedule." I am more productive when I sleep at night. I'm not a happy camper today. I have a commitment this evening I can't miss, and then I will work on character development, and play around with Papel and yWriter4 to see which one I will use for the novel. I'm going to try very hard to get to sleep by 2AM, and get up at a decent hour tomorrow.

I feel like I've wasted a whole day of preparation for NaNo. Since I'm starting at 12:01 a.m. Friday night, I'm down to four prep days left. Today is a wash. That's not a good thing.




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Then Alice Sees Another Bunny

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Description unavailableImage by jvoves via Flickr

I'm wrapping up the Muse Online Writers Conference today. Tomorrow is cut and paste day in the forums, thanks to a network failure that occurred Monday and lasted through most of Tuesday. I got behind on assignments, and then I just said that little phrase I say when it's all over but the crying. I downloaded the new handouts, snagged the freebies, read what I could, and that was all I could do. It's my own fault really. I signed up for too much. Moderation is not one of my strong points. I couldn't help myself. I was like a starving woman at a buffet when I saw all the workshops. You have to realize that I'm coming off a 10 year block due to grief and trauma. I just started writing again this past spring. I haven't been to a Writers Conference since 1994. Not writing a word in ten years was like being in a never-ending nightmare, and I woke up and tried to catch up on everything I had missed.

Since I was a teenager it's been my dream to be a novelist. That's really all I ever wanted to be. Insecurity and fear kept me from showing my work to anyone other than family. Fear of rejection kept me from submitting my work even in high school. I kept writing in my 20's and 30's, and shoved the manuscripts in a drawer.

I buried my high school sweetheart and the father of my children at 33. And I stopped writing. I remarried a year later. This husband knew I had written about every detail of my life prior to our marriage. He read my work in secret. He was an extremely paranoid person, and thought I'd write about him. In 2004, he burned everything I'd ever written. Over thirty poems, a dozen short stories, more than a dozen journals, and the beginnings of a novel all went up in flames right before my eyes. He was shot to death the next day, and I witnessed the shooting. And I lost my last husband on Sept. 11, 2007. (Yes, that makes three. Yes, the last one really was the last one.)

So, after all those funerals and a lot of therapy, I'm through being afraid. Life is too short. I have too much to say. The words will not be contained anymore. They want out, and I'm letting them escape.

I committed to NaNoWriMo back in the summer. I just want to finish. That will bring me one step closer to that dream I had when I was 14 and read "The Shining" by Stephen King. I was blown away. I looked over my shoulder for three days, and could not get the story out of my head. And I knew then what I wanted to do the rest of my life. Write novels.

I've got characters, a setting, and a plot. And now I've got another story in my mind, and I don't know which one to tell first. Now, which plot bunny to follow down which rabbithole? Someone said tell both. Maybe I will.

Hurry up, November!




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The Muse Online Writers Conference

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

So far this has been a wonderful experience. I'm taking notes and learning so much. I think I overdid it on the workshops though. I'm just trying to learn as much as I can as quickly as possible. And just a reminder, tomorrow is Blog Action Day, and the theme this year is poverty. I've experienced poverty, so I'll be posting again today about this event. Stay tuned....




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Ink In My Sweet Tea: The Journal of a Southern Writer by Helen H. David is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.



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