Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving/weekend. I spent much of my long weekend in the mountains, where we had temperatures from bitter cold to chilly-but-nice. That’s the Appalachians for you. My mini vacation gave me some inspiration for our next monthly theme, but we’ll get to that.
November featured our regular contributors again, with a galumphing theme which carried the symbolic depth I had hoped it would. Continue reading “December’s Theme: Tracking Mud through the House”
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I normally have at least two Thanksgiving meals each year: one with my mother’s family, and one with my father’s family. I love getting together with my family — whichever family — and enjoying a feast of a day. Thanksgiving with my father’s family is particularly appealing, as the meal tends to span four or five courses, beginning at 2 or 3pm, and ending with coffee and/or liquor at 9pm. That’s an Italian-American dinner for you. Continue reading “My Thanksgiving without Water”
Welp, November ends on Sunday, as does NaNoWriMo 2014. I have 26,636 words written, and I know I will not be reaching 50,000 by the end of the month. Remember when I said I wanted to hit 35k last week? Same. Such is life. Continue reading “Shit, is November Nearly Over Already?”
Alone she sits in a white padded room,
Trapped in a box it only feels like a tomb,
While the white-coated man coaxes out her tune,
Sippin’ from a mug runneth over with gloom. Continue reading “Free Verse – Soldier, Lake, Glass – SD”
Week two of NaNoWriMo is in the books, and I made decent progress. 17,477 words as of yesterday. So yes, I did slow down considerably from the roaring first week numbers I put up. If you were in a fantasy league for writers, the talking heads would tell you to be cautious about my lack of performance in Week 2. You would have been crazy to think that he could sustain the type of production we saw in his first game week in and week out. The 10,000 words I churned out in week one solidified into butter, and the progress has obviously been slower.
It turns out the detailed character building I touched on last week can slow down the progress of the overall story arc. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I’ve found the slower pace of detailing various characters a great avenue for further exposition, especially for the first couple of chapters of my story. I think the trick is to know when to add a kick to your step to move the story forward. I’m still trying to figure that out, but at least I know that I should speed up the pace soon. Here’s hoping my protagonists get their feet moving soon.
According to NaNo’s daily word count tracker, I am behind the curve, something that NaNo veterans vehemently encourage against in the forums. However, I will rededicate my time to writing this week. New goal for week three: 38,000 words. Cheers.
Steve D
We are one week into NaNoWriMo. As of this moment I have written 10,616 words of my story, which exceeds my initial expectations for this week. When I first signed up for the novel writing contest way back in September, I told myself that achieving 50,000 words in one month was not important; as long as I wrote a substantial amount of my story, I should be satisfied. Even 25,000 words of this story seemed like a fair goal, considering it sat in development limbo for four years prior to November. Continue reading “Creativity Sessions: The Little People Matter, Too”
So kind of a dead month for the October poetry theme, huh? After rolling through various themes with a few submissions each, October featured a grand total of two submissions for the charity theme. Maybe I’ll just have to start spamming all of your message boards with poetry requests!
Or maybe the theme just wasn’t all that interesting, which is understandable, considering the last time we featured a non-sins/virtues theme was way back in June. (I agree, the charity theme was a bit lackluster, but do yourself a favor and go back and read through some of those previous sins/virtues poems from our writers. There were a lot of fascinating submissions.) Continue reading “November Theme: Galumphing Returns!”
November officially begins in two days, and for me and a few hundred thousand other writers, November 1 marks the beginning of my first NaNoWriMo journey. I’ve already given a brief overview of what genre hole I’m stuffing my novel’s peg into, but I’d like to go into a little more detail. Continue reading “My Novel Idea: The Trouble with Genre”
Writing 50,000 words in the span of one month sounds crazy to me. That means writing, on average, 1,667 words per day, which doesn’t sound daunting, but really is because I have to actually come up with 1,667 things to say every day.
Context? Yes, that might be helpful. Continue reading “My Novel Idea – NaNoWriMo”
Pacing at an intersection along US-Forty,
Dirty hat in his hands, asking for some charity.
The cars whiz by, ignoring the disparity,
Of being homeless yet surrounded by prosperity. Continue reading “Charity – Free Verse – SD”
Evening Satellite Publishing 