Hey, National Novel Writing Month!
Sunday, October 31, 2004Well, as you know, I can't really participate...but since my book's about 40,000 words, another 50,000 would make it a solid first draft. So I'll defiantely participate, but only via my journal. If you want to participate by proxy, comment...I'll go over to your journal, and post comments, and we can egg each other on. Feel free to post your daily word counts, just don't stick your tounge out at me when you're doing a maginificent 8,000 words a day and I'm eeking a log at 700. :-P
I am so hoping that, if I work on this like it's a goal people expect me to meet, that I'll actually get my first draft done. Then I can use December to catch up on everything.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 11:22 AM
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Cindy,
What a neat idea! I never thought of using NaNoWriMo to add to a work-in-progress. When I signed up for NaNoWriMo a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking I would have to start a new work altogether. I don't know why I was thinking that way. The whole point, after all, is to write 50K words. We'll see what happens, eh?
I've bookmarked your blog, so that I can visit it more often.
Gary :D
Thank you very much! I'm looking forward to seeing how you do this month....
New favorite places...
Monday, October 25, 2004My two new favorite places online are:
www.jwwaterhouse.com , where you can view the fabulous work of John William Waterhouse online. There was a joke on Buffy that most people buy Gustav Klimt's The Kiss for their dorms, but Waterhouse's Lady of Shallot (the one with the sad looking chick on the boat) is certainly in the running.
In fact, I'm looking at my copy, which I got run through the laminator at the library and so it's as nice as the day I plunked down nine dollars for it, right now...
The other place I'm really digging is BBC 4, in particular, The Saturday Play. Now some of you fellow Gaimanmaniacs are nodding, because he's mentioned this place before, but I never really paid attention to it when he mentiond it, because anything like that is usually too much for my computer. But I heard some Alan Rickman radio plays a couple months back, and someone told me James D'Arcy was doing one on BBC 4, so I tuned in. And now I'm addicted. I hate audio books, but radio plays are different. Perhaps because there are sound effects, because people are acting and not reading, and you have more than one voice. The Woman in Black was particularly cool, because the script had the main character occasionally narrate his thoughts as if he was trying to write what he saw down. This week's The Blotting Book, which I've only heard part of so far. It's wonderful to sit back with a cup of tea and some crochet or cross stitch, and listen.
Also, they're playing "Hitch hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" right now, the original, I think.
OH. Finished typing in my book. Am sad that I had less words than I thought I'd written....and only eight weeks left of the year. (If I want the Holidays off) I'm thinking of partaking of Nanamowrimo solely on my blogger, openly admitting that I've already got 40 some words, and I'm striving to finish it off. Might be fun. :-) I know what I'm going to write, at least...I think this will be a very good book. At least I hope so. I'm wincing less than usual.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 10:38 PM
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What's in your pockets?
Tuesday, October 19, 2004Over at Fantasist dot net, there's a fun little generator. By clicking one of five boxes, (or any combination) it will randomly generate pocket contents for your charcater. :-)
http://www.fantasist.net/pockets.shtml
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 11:41 AM
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Listening to the rain...
Monday, October 18, 2004I love rain.
Anyway, does anyone else notice that when they write, they find themselves adhering to the season that they're writing in? It drives me mad, because, for me, at least, you know I'll be writing or re-writing during a couple different seasons. I started Balancing Act in winter, and so sometimes I'd forget and want to write a summer scene, because I was writing, for example, the second prolouge, in summer. Blue Moon was a fall book for the same reasons, and one scene, I found, when I did the re-write, had snow. Now it's fall, and Palace of Bone, a summer book, (and needs to be summer for more than one reason...not just because I started it then, and thought it'd be nice to have a book in a seaon I'd not done yet, but also because it takes place about the same time as Pilgrims of the Night...which has to take place in summer if it happens shortly before Balancing Act.) wants to become fall. I wrote a woods scene and had to re-write when I realized Minerva was bundling up.
Of course, when you sit in front of your computer wrapped in three afgans, you tend to forget to write about people sweating.
The earlier part of the day was spent cleaning under my bed so I could put more books under it. Some of that dust was thick enough to card and save to make a yurt. (Not really, but I liked the comment...well, there was one little piece that was thick enough to remind me of felt.)
I keep stumbling across Livejournals in my reasearch of late. It's amazing...when I first looked at LJ, it was a journalling device that you had to get someone who already had an LJ account to invite you so you could have one, too. You couldn't just sign up. Now it's a thriving community. I'm tempted to syndicate over there, but don't know if syndicators get to have as much fun...you know, the friend lists, the interest lists, the level of communicating, the mood and music things, as a regular member. Also not sure if cutting and pasting from the blog to an LJ account so I could have all these things would be a proper thing to do...and you know I have a hard enough time finding things to blather on about without trying to hold down two accounts.
I could embed a LJ into my webpage, you can do that now, but I've gotten rather attached to my blog. I was a pro member, so I feel like, I dunno, like I have a bit of history with it.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 5:14 PM
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Cold! Rainy!
Friday, October 15, 2004That's the sum of what's going on in my brain. Sigh.
I've been typing in Palace of Bone still, and doing fairly well. Unfortunately my book reviewing has suffered a bit (begs forgiveness) but I might almost 9but not quite) make my goal of a first draft done by the beginning of the year.
Sometimes, when you write by hand then type in, it's actually helpful. Having the words down keep you going even when you're tired of writing, because you know what's going to happen next, you don't have to make it up. And sometimes the words that are down trigger another scene, something you need to add, something for another part of the book. So you hit enter a few times, and start typing.
It really is winter, even though the trees still have leaves. The first real sign of winter is when I break down and dig out my crocheted sack thing. You know, the thing that's two afgans sewed together. It smells like the lavender I stored it with.
There are some movies, when your listing your favorites, you forget. Wolf is one of the ones I forgot. I saw it again the other night, and I think it's a fabulous werewolf movie...I'm not much on Jack Nicholson, but when he's really good, for the space of that movie, he's your favorite actor. The movie is about a book editor for a major publishing house who, on a trip coming back from Vermont accidentally hits a wolf...the wolf, peeved, bites him when he tries to drag it off the road. He starts to improve...his senses sharpen, stuff like that. It's fun for me both because it's set in the book world and because everyone's really good in it. Nicholson actually acts in a dog like manner...his ears move to catch sounds, the way he tilts his head, are all very canine. Perfect for this time of year, too...and for people who enjoy watching James Spader be slimy and evil.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 7:07 PM
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Self posting to see what blogger comments are like...hum. Interesting. I wonder what everyone else thinks?
Thursday, October 14, 2004Was one of the people who watched the debate last night. Am still not happy.
It all reminds me a great deal of the bit in Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten, where the bad guy and another gent are at a debate, and they each get points based on how well they defelect the question. Extra points for not only completely ignoring the intent of the question, but hijacking it for your own political agenda. Well, maybe not *that* bad, but close.
For those of you who think I'm never going to post *anything* of writerly importance ever again, I give you a link sent to me via my publisher's author group. My editor finds the neatest, most interesting links:
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/5/ideas-books-beckerman.asp
"A First-Time Nonfiction Author Learns That Getting Published Is Not Necessarily the Hard Part" is the tag line, and I think the article, "The Education of Stacey Sullivan" is a must read.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 8:24 PM
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Ruminating for no good reason...
Saturday, October 09, 2004Another day of yard work. I like it sometimes because when it's you and the sythe everything is simpler. The woods around you are quiet, and you can think.
Of course, being me, and being bored with pulling a long piece of metal attached to a long peice of wood (the secret to scything: keep the point moving forward.) I used this time, not to unknot my plot, but to try and remeber exactly how the Philosopher's Song from Monty Python went...
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as shloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 4:19 PM
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PMA entries came. :-)
Tuesday, October 05, 2004Today I received the entries I'm judging for the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Awards, which is help by the Publisher's Marketing Assoc. I'm so excited! It's a really interesting thing to do...you get some books, and you fill out a form, and write about the book on the back. Of course, I'm not saying what category, but it's certainly not one you'd expect.
My comments are so messed up! They don't show up in AOL, they show up in explorer. I get one emailed to me, it never shows up on the blogger...so if you wonder what happened to it, I never deleted it. So I'll make a few comments to comments here...
Nichole...thanks for the wonderful words, and I'm still so thrilled for you.
The person who emailed me about Doctor Phil...I wasn't saying at all what he was doing was a good thing, you're right, it was mean, I just said I wanted to know what he was talking about. Right now I'm writing a mystery...a serial killer was in it, but he's not, the mystery is more in the aftermath of the serial killer's death....so, these indicatiors would have been interesting, as my characters autopsy the man's life in the hope that they can figure out what's going on.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 9:26 PM
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The subject kline's from one of my favorite songs, "See the Lights" by Simple Minds.
And so it is. I've spent the last couple of weeks mowing the lawn, scything (yep, with a real sythe...all I need is a long black cape, and I can scare away the neihbors...should they ever be so foolish as to walk two miles to my house...) because the bigger, tougher weeds I didn't get before are too much for the weed eater string, washing cars, all that. I wish I could burn some brush, and get rid of the piles of it i made in my attempts to wrestle this place into some sort of shape.
As a whole, i'm more productive in winter, so that should be ok. I'm typing in what I hand wrote of Palace of Bone, and you know, I shouldn't say this, but I'm actually enjoying it. I read a few things and wince and re-work it, but a few things, especially the conversations between Dr. "No first name that I allow anyone to call me" Ashton and Minerva "Hell yes why not>!" Corvae are hilarious. In a really good way. There's some checmistry...they're starting to work well together. I'm releived, because ever since I read in an intrveiw with Jude Deveraux that once she had to throw out a book because her characters argued all the time...not the sexy, good arguments that lead to love, but "I hate you, die" arguments, I was worried that perhaps they wouldn't be able to come to terms with each other. They are very different.
Romance doesn't really matter, because they aren't going to do anything beyind have some tension, and learn to get along, in this novel, but it's good to see they will fall in love. I like love. It's important to me...I try not to make it a big part of the story, but I enjoy writing it. Not enough that I could ever be a romance writer (though my contract for Balancing Act has it listed as a paranormal romance...um...) but enough that developing it as a subplot makes me happy.
Permalink Cindy scribed this at 9:26 PM
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