Nanowrimo Midpoint and Counting

Welcome to the halfway point of Nanowrimo 2020. Since I’m pre-scheduling posts to give myself more time to work on my Nano-project, let’s just assume that I’m halfway to my goal, and happily sitting on 25,000 words of short stories. I’m enjoying picturing that, but the truth is that knowing I already said I was

National Novel Writing Month and YOU!

Today is the second day of Nanowrimo, which means that by midnight tonight, I should have somewhere in the neighborhood of… math, math, math… 3,334 words. That’s all of my stories for the Storytime Blog Hop next year, and a solid start on something a little more serious to submit for publication. Obviously, this post

Manuscript Resuscitation

I’m working on that revision. You know the one. Time to turn that towering pile of crap into something I wouldn’t mind the neighbors seeing. (There’s also a notebook full of…well… notes to keep me on track.) I’ve been working on getting my stuff together for a while, now. I have my outline, my note

That Creeping Dread of Revision

I just printed out a manuscript for (yet another) read-through. I don’t know why, but for some reason, this is striking me as being a very big deal. I don’t expect this one to be a big project. After all, it’s already been revised. (Twice.) It’s not even like I haven’t sent it out before.

The Joy of Losing NaNoWriMo

I’ll be starting NaNoWriMo in about a month, but let’s be honest… I don’t expect to win. Fifty-thousand words in a single month is a lot, and a new project? Well, it could happen, but I’m still working on the old one, right now. My tiny little pantser mind has just the tiniest breeze of

NaNoWrimo Prep Month

National Novel Writing Month is coming up in three weeks. Three weeks?!? Yup. Twenty-one days. And while I’ve always been a little hit-or-miss in winning NaNo, I usually start the month with good intentions. This time, I’m starting the month with two pristine notebooks (240 pages each) and a shiny set of brand-new ballpoints in

Cutting Manuscripts In Public

I spent yesterday playing slice and dice with the next overgrown sasquatch-chapter of the manuscript I’ve been revising. 40 pages going in, and probably right around thirty by the time I decided it would just be easier to rewrite the whole thing. There are just too many pieces, people! I think I’d collected every single

Juggling Timelines and Cutting with Vigor

I’m making progress on putting my manuscript into chronological order. Most of the time, it’s my own stubbornness slowing things down. Oh, yes…. I’m aware that I just cut out that whole timeline, but that scene is so good. I’m moving things from wherever they happened to fall in the old manuscript file to their

Getting Back to Work is Hard to Do

Why is it that good habits are so much easier to break than bad ones? Let me lay it out for you. My pattern is this:1.) Get into a good writing habit. 2.) Stop to revise. 3.) Really, really stop to revise. Farewell, new words. 4.)  Fail to make revision a measurable part of my

And the NaNoWriMo Results…

At the beginning of last month, I set out to write a novel–50,000 words of one,  anyway–in 30 days. And… I was going to do this one sheet of paper at a time, in hopes of a cleaner draft and ultimately, an easier revision. (I’m always looking for an easier revision.) I was behind from

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