You know, I have so many tumblrs that I follow bookmarked, it might be more efficient just to get an account ( Read more... )

So, after temporarily(?) abandoning the Pile of Suck, I've been trying to take things slow, stare at the sky, and brainstorm without a pen in my hand so I don't just write down the first stupid thing that comes into my head ( Read more... )

Last week I finished my first draft. It really wasn't anything to celebrate, I roughed out the last couple of chapters as fast as I could just to get it done. I hate it. I'd like a second opinion, but on the other hand I half arsed the last little bit so I know it's bad. The best I can do is try and forget about it for a while, and think of other ( Read more... )

Livejournal's been weird lately, so I've got a bit of random stuff saved up.

Thing the First: I submitted A Silent Dog to Penguin today. I won't know they'll have rejected it until March, however. Getting published is such a tedious process ( Read more... )

Some time ago, I seem to recall writing a post in which I cautioned myself against writing too fast and writing things wrong. Which was all very well, but it's very hard to tell when you're writing too fast until after it's written. My most productive day this week has a negative wordcount. -2500 words, roughly. I have not yet made up the ( Read more... )

Today was productive. I had a late shift, so I had time to write in the morning. I sat down and read over the last chapter of my draft, making a few alterations. But I still didn't feel like adding any more to it, so I spent the rest of the morning writing a chapter and quarter of fanfiction ( Read more... )

Feeling better. Onwards.

Whenever I write a novel, I start with a very short, rough, outline and usually it looks like this:

Beginning. Plot. Plot-a-plot-a-plot-a-plot. Plot plot. ? Plot plot. Conclusion.Then I start writing, and sometimes the plots get big and plump and sometimes they disappear entirely. Did you see that ?? It's still there. As ( Read more... )

So, I'm not entirely sure how long my draft is. My netbook, and my computer, both running Office Libre, disagree on the wordcount. By a thousand words. The good news is that the draft is now 42k long. Or 41k. Either way, I think I'm over halfway. It's a bit hard to tell, but given the maxiumum length you can submit to the Vogel award is 90k (or ( Read more... )

My novel is currently about 33,000 words long, so I'm definitely somewhere in the middle and will be for some time. All of these strategies have worked for me at one point or another, so I'm collecting them for future reference and maybe they'll be useful to some of the writers on my f'list.

1. Move! Sitting in the same place in the same way can ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I had a bad writing day. Everything I wrote was terrible; a disservice to my characters and just cringeworthy in general. I suspect this was due to a combination of my preferred writing space being entirely washed out by squalls, and the fact that I was far more interested in playing Persona 4, and was writing out of a sense of duty ( Read more... )