I just finished a 2500-word story.

In two days.

This is, if not unprecedented for me, certainly damned unusual. That's half a month's output, by my typical standard! And even when I've written that many words, I don't think I've ever finished an entire work that quickly.

It still needs a title; yeah, this is that definition of "finished". But it's ( Read more... )

The "creepy fae thing" (a.k.a. "Going Home") is now in the hands of my alpha reader.

Writing challenge: Write what basically amounts to a 1500-word torture scene without overusing the word "pain" to the point that it ceases to have any meaning.

This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/233282.html because I got tired of ( Read more... )

I have written a 3600-word story in six days, 1600 of it yesterday. That is very nearly unprecedented for me -- despite the story fighting me every step of the way.

And despite my having referred to it as a "flaccid lump of story" at one point, I ended up with something I'm actually pretty happy with. My alpha reader laughed in the right places, ( Read more... )

There's nothing like writing a story specifically for an anthology, only to learn that they've received a surfeit of similarly-themed stories repurposed from some other anthology. *sigh ( Read more... )

So, Michigan is under stay-home orders as of today, essential services excepted -- pretty much what we were supposed to be doing anyway. Housemate is already working from home because of the broken leg; my freelance work is from-home anyway, and the Day Job is considered essential, so no real change here. Except that coordinating a trip to the ( Read more... )

Lost in the shuffle of cons and cats and exploding electrical lines, was the fact that I came back from Narrativity having promised myself I would start writing again, settled down after a few days' recovery time with the best of intentions, and my writing laptop promptly died. Now, this was the not-happy machine previously mentioned, so it could ( Read more... )

As a writer, I struggle with physical descriptions of characters. Partly this is because, as a reader, I'm largely oblivious to them; I'm not one of those readers who envisions a movie in her head whilst reading, and what people look like is especially not something I devote mental processing power to. (I have considerable trouble with it in real ( Read more... )

One of the things that always happens when I'm nearing the end of a novel is that I start pondering what to write next. It's a great procrastination technique. This time was no exception, though what with computer failures and internet outages, the speculation is a tetch stale by now. But I'm going to post it anyway -- and not just for my own ( Read more... )

I meant to get the novel done before the beginning of May. Then before MediaWest. Then before the end of May. Then June 21?, which would have been exactly the four-year mark since I started. Then the end of June. Then the end of July. At least I made it before BistoCon, which was deadline... six? seven? of the current crop. There were ( Read more... )

( Cut for yet more spoilers on unpublished novel )