Revision has begun!!!

Okay, so I lasted 11 days before I started to revise. I blame the NaNoWriMo website; they had a post on there which a longtime NaNo alumni says that she gives it a week before she starts revising. I gave it 11 days, and I started in today (actually late last night/early this morning before I went to bed). What I’ve done so far is to skim through it and write down a chapter by chapter synopsis. I’m doing this so I can make sure the plot is solid. I finished with that about 20 minutes ago. I’m going to compile it into one document and see if I need to mess with the plot. I came across a few plot holes while I was typing up the synopsis: nothing too glaring, but there are a few. Once I do that, I will see if I need to add any chapters. I also need to pick a few names for things (while I was writing NaNo, I would put placeholders in the text, such as “Aaaa” and so on, keeping a separate file keeping track of what those names need to be. I can put all those in before I do the line by line editing. Also, I think I want to briefly sketch out the rest of the story (I envision this to be either book 1 in a series or the first part of a book, depending on how long it is once I revise/rewrite it) so that I can see if the revised plot jives with it. Once I make any adjustments there, I'm either going to a)start rewriting/revising based off of that document or b)type up an outline of the revised plot document before I start my rewrite. Once I finish the second draft, I am going to start letting people read it.
I'm also trying to form a writer’s group. I belong to one already, but I am going to form a more focused group that that. Most established authors I’ve talked to or read about talk about the importance of a writer’s group. It will be small and focused, giving me a group to get some serious feedback on it. Let's face it, it’s A LOT to ask of someone to read a novel you wrote and comment on it. I will also get the chance to do the same for the others there.
That's all for now. It's Nikki’s birthday today, so I’ll be taking her out this evening. I have a big job interview this afternoon, so keep your fingers crossed! I'm pretty sure that unless the interviewer is a drunken or depressed robot with no understanding at all of human interactions that I’ll walk out of there with a job (or at least that’s the attitude I'm going to walk in there with). Should be pretty decent. I would love to be able, as part of my birthday present to her, to tell Nikki I just got a job! Not working sucks donkey balls.

7,705 Words down, only 42,295 to go!!!

So here's an excerpt from my book. It's still in rough draft form, so be gentle.

He heard the cry of an eagle, far off in the distance. All thoughts of turning back, of hesitation had to be squashed. He had a role to fulfill; a purpose, and that was what he would do. There was no backing off now, no other road to take, and now there was no time left.
He sat down, crossing his legs and began to prepare himself. He quieted all sensation, all thought, all outside influence. It was just him and his body. He reached right down inside his soul and began to pull. The pain that began slowly, yet grew to fill every part of his body with a liquid fire did not even faze him. Anyone observing him would have simply thought him meditating, or perhaps asleep. He was anything but. Though his eyes were closed, his awareness of himself and of the world around him became near to omnipotent. After what would have seemed to him like a long time (if his mind had been aware of it), he rose, black cloak blowing in the early morning breeze, the rest of his pitch black garb tight as skin. He was of a different mindset entirely now. There was only one thing to do now, only one thing that mattered, only one thing that existed.
Take the child. Kill the rest.
He started down the slope toward the town, unhurriedly.

Hope you enjoyed it! More to follow! Ciao for now!!!

It Begins!!!

Yayyyyy!!! NaNoWriMo is here! Finally, I get to work on this book. I’ve been planning for awhile, now I get to actually write it. I’m pretty stoked about the whole thing if you can’t tell! A little over 3 hours into it, and I’ve already accomplished a lot!

I courageously (or stupidly, depending on how you look at it) took a dare on the NaNo forums to write 5000 words my first day. This makes a lot of sense for me. I have several things going on this year I did NOT have going on last year.

1) Money. I’m unemployed currently, as I was last year. That part is no different. What is different is that I had a steady Unemployment check coming in every week. This year I do not. My ex-employer lied to the employment commission and told them that I quit, so I haven't received any money yet. I have a hearing on thursday, so hopefully that will all work itself out by then. Until then, I have to scramble for money each and every week to get bills paid.

2) Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time book 13) comes out November 2nd. Book 12 came out last year on October 27th, and I didn’t even start NaNo until the 4th or 5th of November. I read the book in like 18 hours or something. I will need a large block of time to read the book.

3)Book Signing. I did go to this last year for The Gathering Storm, but I wasn’t there in any official capacity. This year, I am one of the Tower Guard (free assistant to the author), so I’ll have to be there longer with less freedom while I'm there. The chance to get some one on one time with Brandon Sanderson and Harriet Rigney is too good to pass up. Sanderson is my favorite living author, and I can't WAIT to pick his brain.

4)Thanksgiving. Last year, I stayed in town for Thanksgiving. This year, I'm travelling with both of my kids and my pregnant girlfriend to see my parents. I will probably be there for several days. I will still have time to write, just not so sure about privacy, as they have a pretty small house.

5)Pregnant Girlfriend. She’s only 8 weeks along at this point, but you never can tell how women will act. I cannot and will not ignore her to write. There are simply times when I will have to not write because she needs/wants me, and I’m happy to do that!


I'm also trying to get my World of Warcraft character (a Blood Elf Warlock on the Fenris Server, currently level 60 for those who are interested) to level 80 before the expansion pack comes out on December 7th. I’m not putting that in the list because honestly, it's not as important to me as getting this novel done. I have already warned my Guildmates that I may not be around much over the next month, but I’ll do what I can.

I’m looking at all these things as challenges rather than as obstacles. Perhaps it will motivate me even more than I was last year to finish. That being said, any time I can catch up and write ahead of my word count goal, I’m going to take the opportunity. Writing 5000 words today will put me fully 2 days ahead of schedule. If I can do that every once in awhile, that will really help.

Well, I'm off to bed now. My plan is to get a few hours of shuteye, get up and take care of some financial/real world stuff I need to, put in a few job applications, and go find a coffee shop somewhere to write. I don’t have any particular time I need to get up, but I don’t want to sleep the whole day away. As of this writing, I have 2.637 words so far, so I only need to write 2, 363 words before midnight tomorrow in order to make the 5000. Wish me luck!!!

Plot Panic

3 days to go until NaNoWriMo! Still don't have a job, and my unemployment benefits are being held back because my last employer lied to the employment commission and told them that I quit (which I most certainly did not). My car got repossessed and I've been sick. That being said, I'm still excited about NaNo!

I'm taking the approach that I want to have a more detailed outline this year. I made a post asking for help with a block I got to, and I got some great feedback. Here's the post I made...

Plowing right along, plotting and outlining furiously before NaNo begins. This will be my 2nd year. Last year I had ideas for scenes I put on notecards and arranged them the way I wanted and wrote from that. Wasn't too terribly happy with it. Have written a few things since then in a "seat of your pants" style, but that didn't seem to suit me. This year for NaNo, I'm trying to have a complete plot outline before the 1st so I can write from that. One small problem; my plot is stalled.

Long story short, the book is Epic Fantasy w/a rough edge. The MC is a female who is going after an assassin that's part of a larger organization of assassins. She worked at a home for unwanted children in a largish village/town, an assassin came in, killed all the kids but one and kidnapped him. Noone would help her, so she took off on her own to find these guys. She came to a village, booked passage downriver to the nearest major city while picking up a teenage boy tagalong. They get to the city and get a room at an inn. He wants to help, she says no. He leaves, intending to try and pick up info anyway. She goes to the library, and when she comes back, there's an assassin in her room that attempts to talk her out of pursuing them (sort of a "it's too big of a picture for you to understand" kind of thing). She summons a trickster spirit (it's the 2nd time she's summoned him; she was warned to only do it once) to get more power. That's where I'm stalled. I have a rough idea for an ending, but I seem to be stopped right there.

Any suggestions? Ideas? Ideas or suggestions on how to come up wih my own ideas? Any help is appreciated.

I got back some very helpful suggestions. Here's what I've been working on this morning (I would have done more, but I was hampered by an hour long search for my wallet).

First, why did the assassin try to talk her out of pursuing them? Why not just kill her? There must be a reason behind that.
I’m not sure that does make sense. Possibly he can be someone sent by Ravyn to try and mollify his grief. And perhaps it wasn't an assassin. Perhaps it was a member of the opposing faction, or one of the good guys trying to help her.
Second, why was she warned to only summon the trickster once? What are the consequences of summoning it more than once? Because it becomes addictive. The more I think about this, the more I like the idea of Mahrna hanging herself after Naoren leaves.

- Why does this assassin simply talk to her instead of killing her? Is he potentially a more moral assassin than the one who killed all the children? Might she be able to get more information out of him or persuade him to see things from her point of view and maybe even enlist his help? What kind of people does this group of assassins kill? Good people? Bad people? Whoever their boss tells them too? the more I think about why the assassin would just talk to her, the more it doesn't make sense. Being a large organization, they're not going to really give a shit. They wouldn’t talk to her. They would just kill her, and she wouldn’t see it coming. As far as what they kill, who they are? They are a far-reaching organization, sort of like the “illuminati”
- Why did the assassin go for that one kid in the first place? Does the kid have some sort of abilities or special parents or something? What are the goals of the assassins or the people paying them? Noone is playing them, they are a branch of an illuminati-like organization. The kid is important to their goals, he may have some powers or something to do in the future, maybe a “golden child” type thing.
- The trickster spirit- what will the repercussions of her ignoring the warning be? How will she get out of whatever the consequences are? Jack gets his claws into naoren.
- When will the teenage boy show up again? Can he help her get out of whatever crap she brings down upon herself by summoning the trickster? Will she then accept him as a companion? He is the “golden child” of the opposition, or maybe a counter to the trickster
-What other characters might she meet that will help or hinder her on the journey? Who can she go to for information about who the assassin is, what he wants with the child, how he can be stopped etc? What does she expect to do when she finally meets him? Does she have any sort of training/power/skill that will help her face him or will it be more about having a ballsy personality and extreme will to succeed? She’s going to meet someone in the library that will help her in more ways than one. She doesn’t quite know what she’ll do when she meets him (and I need to illustrate this in the book). she has no training, it's gonna be a ballsy personality bolstered by insanity and power that she has no idea what to do with.

So that's where I'm at now. The nice thing about coming into outling from a sort-of "seat of your pants" discovery writer perspective is that I dont' feel like I have to adhere to the outline religiously. It's fluid and adjustable. And with the software I'm using (liquid story binder, well worth the $45.95 pricetag), it's very easy to do all that and have it in one place.

I'm fucking ITCHING LIKE FUCK to start writing. You can bet that unless my pregnant girlfriend needs something, when the clock strikes midnight and the month turns to November, I'm going to be typing away!!!

Hello Again!!!

Hey all. Sorry it’s such a long time since I made a post (yeah, like there are 2,354,453 people who are like “Goddammit, when’s he gonna post again). A lot has been going on in my life, and I lost my way for a bit as a writer. Feel like I’m back on track now, so it’s all good.

Last year I did NaNoWrimo completely differently from the way I’m doing it this year. Last year, I didn’t decide to do NaNoWrimo ‘till November 5th. I had a draft of part of my book already written (probably 5500 words or so, I forget exactly how much), so I started with that and rewrote it completely, changing a lot of it. Once I had gone through that, I was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants. There’s not plotting, note taking, or anything else during NaNo; there just isn't time. I had a beginning, the start of a middle (though that wasn’t very good, most of it), and I knew what I wanted the ending to be. I had a list of scenes on index cards that I rearranged until it looked good to me (I did this on Nov. 5th), but the plot quickly drew away from that. Part of that was that I had never tried to write anything longer than an 11 page paper for a class (in high school) or a short story (in college), and that I really had no clue about the writing process. Not that I'm an expert now, but I have learned a few things.

After NaNo was over, I left the story completely alone for 6 or 7 weeks. When I started trying to edit it, I was hit with a terrible case of Writer’s Block. There was also this weird self-loathing that would come up when I tried to work on it, so I stopped. I played around with a short story that I had written back in high school. That actually went fairly well, though I stopped working on that after 2 or 3 revisions. It still needs a little more, but it’s a lot bette than it was. But every time I went back to my NaNo book (the title of which is “The Rope of Death”. Those of you who partied with me in 1995 may remember that), I hit a brick fucking wall. I got a job in March so I had much less time to write. I soon stopped trying to do much but piddle with it every once in awhile and got more heavily into video games than I intended to. I began to despair that I would every amount to anything as a writer, or as a person for that matter. I took a vacation with my girlfriend in June to the Mountain Lake Hotel in Pembroke, VA (the place where Dirty Dancing was filmed), and started writing a lot there. Though I wasn't writing anything for The Rope of Death, I was writing. About a month and a half or two months ago, I picked it back up.

My favorite living author, Brandon Sanderson, came out with The Way of Kings, and I picked up The Rope of Death again. I was less discouraged now. I had some new ideas, and I was pretty excited about them. I went to a book signing with Brandon Sanderson and got some suggestions on how to come up with a new beginning if I was stuck, but my girlfriend gave me the idea that I eventually used. Now that it’s almost time for NaNo to start, I’ve put The Rope of Death away. Probably I will pick it up again in December, after NaNo is over. I will probably be working on that book for years before it’s ready to be published in any way, shape, or form. I’m at peace with that.

I also started to get really excited about NaNoWrimo this year. I had been piddling around with an idea for an epic fantasy for awhile, so I decided to go with that. I brainstormed and freewrote and came up with a barebones plot idea and some characters. I updated my copy of Liquid Story Binder and started using it. I now have some of the major characters and a detailed outline that stops part of the way into Act II (using the 3 act concept to write it). I’m a bit bogged down in act II, so we’ll see what I’m able to do in the next 5 days. As I said earlie, there’s no time to do more plotting or outlining during NaNo, so whatever I get done, I will start with that. I can always fix it later!

So that’s where I’m at now with everything. It’s not a bad place to be. I’m looking at NaNoWrimo completely differently this year. I do NOT expect to have a finished manuscript that will be ready for publication with a few minor tweaks here and there. What I hope to have is a finished first draft of a Novel that will provide a good starting point to be rewritten later. My expectations are pretty low this year. If I can complete it and have a decent story (even if the execution is kinda shitty) when I'm done, I will feel like I did well. I’m going to try and update regularly during NaNo, but we’ll see how that goes. Thanks for reading this. When I get some finances straight, I plan to get a website of my own to put all my writing stuff on. I hope all of you will go there. Ciao for now!!

My writer's block is starting to break!!!

It's funny and ironic, but it seems as if the Writer's block is starting to break because I'm writing about how bad it is! I haven't done much more of substance yet, but I've been writing a lot over the last few days. I probably wrote close to 1000 words yesterday. The hard part about it seems to be finding a new routine.

See, if I have a routine I can stick with, then it's not a problem to write. Again, sometimes I may just write 1000 words about how I don't feel like fucking writing, but I'll write. I'm doing some of that now, but what I've started to do more of is to write about my book; what's good, what's bad, what needs to be changed, and how I proceed from here. The really difficult part about it now is that I do not have a schedule yet. Since I have to have a real job now, my time is limited, and that sucks major donkey ass. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck!!

That's all for now. Gotta get ready for work. Batteries, anyone?

excerpt from Chapter 1

Okay, this goes without saying, but all material here is mine. If you use or reproduce it without my permission, I will seek you out and force you to watch videos of George W. Bush giving his father a filthy sanchez.

Now that we've covered that, the below is an excerpt from chapter 1. My protagonist, Marcus Bent is sending an email to his friend. This is partial text from his email.

God, maybe I really am going crazy. I was fascinated, but I was also confused as hell and worried. I liked going to this other place, even though it was probably just a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep, but I could really see myself getting lost in there. Would that be so bad, to stay there, leaving this world behind?
I know, I know. I can’t let myself get lost in…well in whatever that was because I know it’s not real. There was a corner of mine screaming at me, reminding me that if I let myself go, I would lose all chance I ever had at regaining my tenuous grip on reality. Pretty screwy, I know. What do you want, I hadn’t slept in forever.
When nothing happened for a few minutes, I decided to try for the house again. I got up cautiously and walked quickly toward the door. When I reached it, I looked around momentarily. Don’t know what I was looking for, maybe I was just scared I wouldn’t make it. I wanted to be prepared, which was stupid. It’s not like I knew what the hell I was doing. My body tensed. I took a deep breath and opened the door.
I made it! Like lightning, I about jumped in the door and closed it, locking and latching it. I waited for a moment to make sure I was still there. Goddamn, but I needed some sleep. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and crept lightly but quickly toward the bathroom.
Couldn’t find the percocet, but she did have a few ambient left. I quickly took two and washed them down. Relieved, I walked into my bedroom. I didn’t even bother to pull my clothes off before I plopped down. Alyssa would make fun of me for that, but I did need to get some sleep.

MY ANGRY LESBIAN BREASTS!! AUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH!!!

What?

Blink.