Wait, no. Not Batman. NaNoWriMo!
This month for NaNoWriMo, I’m shooting for One Writerly Thing every day.
Yesterday, I beta-read a short story for my Indyscribes pal Stephanie Cain, which was great fun (as always). It’s part of her Circle City Magic universe.
Today, I did some poking around and thinking about a call for submissions from Rhonda Parrish for an upcoming anthology called “Grimm, Grit, & Gasoline.” From the description: Continue reading NaNoNaNoNaNoNaNo NaNoNaNoNaNoNaNo… BAT-MAAAAN
So, yesterday while I was wasting time on Twitter, I read another blogger’s post about how she wrote a novel in ten minutes a day.
I mean, I definitely waste more than ten minutes a day.
Waaaay more.
But I have a hard time getting into the writing mindset that quickly–and I often waste a bunch of time staring at a blank screen, trying to feel moved or motivated.
I think maybe I need to cut that out…?
So for the month of March, I’m going to try the whole Ten Minutes A Day thing!
Three days a week my Creative Writing class has ten minutes of freewriting a day, so I’ll join them for that instead of using that time for entering attendance, answering emails, whatever.
The other four days I’ll have to come up with some other ten minutes, but I bet I can do it for a month… right?
Anyway, I’ll be tweeting about it, too, so feel free to join me: #10MinMarch
(And now to go put in ten minutes for today, even though March isn’t till tomorrow… woohoo!)
Soooo yeah. That resolution of mine to blog more? Well…
Oh, and those ten pages I was supposed to turn in to my writing group… last Tuesday?
Hmm. And when is enrollment for grad classes for this semester? Oh. Really? Three months ago, you say…?
Yeah. I’ve been falling behind.
But I’m enjoying the ride and I haven’t fallen TOO far to catch up (I hope?) so here we go again!
Some things I’ve been putting off lately: Continue reading there’s that whooshing sound again
I just started watching Season 1 of The Magicians (SyFy) on Netflix last week and have been steadily bingeing through all of it with C. Tragically, tonight he has choir and all we have left is the finale and Season 2 premiers TOMORROW and it looks like SyFy lets you watch things online live and that might (MIGHT) be enough to get me to forgive them for spelling their name that way (SyFy? Seriously?).
As we went through the episodes–“This is like if someone was writing Harry Potter fanfic and kept going further and further off course… in the best possible way,” I said, early on–I started Tweeting about it, made some friends via hashtags… I might or might not have followed most of the cast on Twitter. Um… uhoh. Am I joining a fandom??
I’ve been thinking about adding TV recaps to my blogging fodder. I think maybe #TheMagicians might be the show I choose.
Unless I just spend the next few weeks entering their writing contest (i.e. FANFICTION!). 1500 words by Feb. 8th…
Piece of cake. I’ve got plenty of time and tons of ideas.
…right?
Well, after my flurry of November activity/NaNoWriMo, I sure did taper off on blogging, didn’t I?
And since today’s New Year’s Day, it’s a perfect time to resolve to blog more in 2017!
Among other resolutions, of course. But don’t worry, no “new me” stuff — as Pam says, I really like me. Continue reading New Year, New Me? (Nah)
I’m really loving the posts that Jenny Crusie’s doing about “Story Teams” over on her blog. She’s analyzing why they work (or don’t). She analyzed the teams from Leverage (LOVE it), Person of Interest (tried to like it because she loves it and writes such interesting analysis of it, but…), and Legends of Tomorrow (uhhhhhhh) in preparation for troubleshooting the team she’s building in her WIP.
Reading her posts made me think about some of my favorite TV teams (Burn Notice, Chuck, and Buffy being standouts, and White Collar too, although that’s a duo with support more than a team most of the time, and, of course, the Quest Team/Venture Brothers–Oh, and I guess Archer?).
So I want to analyze these teams the way she’s doing it, mostly for fun but also for comparison to the team I’m trying to build in my Lilly grant novel (YA cli-fi starring Anika, as-yet-untitled). I listed too many, so I might just pick a few from the list.
Of course, that requires me to a)do that analysis and b)figure out what the heck is going on with my team.
And tonight’s not the night for that; I’m going to go to bed and sleep on it, and see what thoughts manage to crawl across my mind in the tryptophan-haze that is post-Thanksgiving relaxation time.
But teams make a pretty satisfying story unit. I’m excited to dig into this more!
My big problem with NaNo is time. I was talking to my mother about it today, and her reaction to the existance of NaNoWriMo was “In November? Don’t they know how much other stuff is going on in November?”
But so far blogging daily has been fun and exciting, and so far so good in terms of meeting my goal.
So maybe I just need to be looking for things with shorter turnaround times. Like flash fiction contests or the 8-Hour Book Challenge! Continue reading two solutions to (one of) my problem(s)
So, having spent the requisite half-hour noodling around with web design (I have definitely not kept up with advances in coding since the late 90s/early 2000s, y’all), I am now ready to stare blankly at a “New Post” window for a while before I knock out today’s blog post.
I happened to be putting around on Twitter earlier and saw some tweets from Cleolinda Jones, which took me waaaay back. I read her LiveJournal (remember LIVEJOURNAL??) obsessively in college and just loved her writing. In fact, that got me to thinking about how much I love recaps, because I actually… follow a lot of recappers pop-culture analysis blogs.
So, it’s that time of year again…
The time where I debate whether or not to fail at NaNoWriMo yet again.
Don’t get me wrong–I love a good tradition! And I’ve been failing NaNo for, like, fifteen years now.
Some years I’ve even failed it professionally (they have a program where teachers can do it with students… Yeah, we all failed). I have buttons.
And remember that one time that I got a huge grant to write a manuscript in three months? “It can’t be that hard,” I said to myself. “Tons of people write a novel in a month.”
(The part where I had a baby right at the beginning of the three months did throw a pretty serious monkey wrench into that plan. And I wrote more than zero words, which puts me ahead of many years’ NaNo efforts…)
According to the NaNo website, my lifetime total is 8,729 words. So, this year–despite the toddler, the full-time (plus) job, the general chaos of life when one is, like me, terrible at saying no to things…
I’m doing it.
Not for the 50,000 words, or the winner badge (because, let’s face it, I am… not optimistic it can be done during this season of my life). But for the practice.
I’m going to write something, anything, every day this month.
Please feel free to harass me via Twitter: @larkinplarkin
Here’s today’s effort. Wish me luck tomorrow…!