Summing Up and Shutting Down

1 CommentBlogging, Revising, Short Stories, winter, writing, , , ,

Last day of Nano. I didn’t wind up hitting 50,000. I did come up with a bunch of short stories that wouldn’t have existed, if I didn’t set a November goal. Short stories are much more immediate than a novel. It won’t take me six months to revise short stories and get them out the

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The Same Thing Twice

1 CommentRevising, writing, ,

I started writing another missing scene for my revision, yesterday. It was… well, pretty damn similar to the scene I wrote the day before. Not identical, but very, very close. Close enough that I wound up stopping to write a blog post about Deja Vu, voice, and the difference between parallels and repetitions. So, I

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How to Survive, Break Out of Jail, and Join the Revolution

3 CommentsFictional Cultures, Revising, ,

Today, my novel’s primary antagonist is breaking out of jail. She’s moving from being one of the many people who work for her particular government–very high up, actually–to being disillusioned by her recent experiences, and generally willing to fight for what she believes in. Yep. I said “antagonist.” She’s done fairly well for herself, considering

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The Morning Writing Hour

4 Commentswriting, ,

I woke up at a quarter to three this morning, with the cat staring me in the face, and clearly wondering why I’m not awake and working on my novel. The cat cares. Well… the cat is a creature of habit. He expects the same thing to happen every single day. If I had the

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How I Use Scheduled Posts

6 CommentsUncategorized, , ,

So, this post from Lois Elsden has me thinking about how and why I schedule blog posts. I do schedule posts, especially if I know I won’t be available on a particular day. For instance, I can tell you right now that I’ll be gone on my mother’s birthday. I don’t know what I’ll be

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And In NaNo Novel News…

3 CommentsNaNoWriMo, writing, ,

My main character has just eloped. With a fairly brilliant physicist. Who knows less about his own family history than she does. (His dead, non-English speaking grandmother told her all about it.) I don’t have the faintest idea what that has to do with anything. At any rate, they’re married, Vegas-style, and he’s in their

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Epiphanies in Fiction Writing

NaNoWriMo, writing, ,

I took a step back, yesterday. Something somewhere between serenely seeking objectivity about my novel and abject despair. Today, I have solutions. Or, at least progress. I figured out who the dead kid in my novel is. I actually didn’t know that question was bothering me, until the answer showed up today. So, that’s one

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U is for Unexpected Surprises

4 CommentsUncategorized,

I was shopping in the rock-bottom bargain bin at a used bookstore, and I bought a few books on the “What are you risking?” plan. Five, maybe ten bucks worth, and ten bucks on used books can go a long way.  I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. It was a grab bag, maybe a little influenced by

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