Whhhhaaat.

You guys. How is it already halfway through November? O_O It's a time warp, I tell you. Or a blue police box.

As I've started NaNoWriMo week 3, I have passed 40,000 words for the month and accomplished one of my goals: I've finished one of the three incomplete novels I had going before November. *throws confetti* One down, two to go. (And one of the two remaining is co-written, so it's shared work.)

What have you been up to during the first half of November? If you're doing NaNo, how's that going for you? If you're not doing NaNo, what have you been doing?

I still can't believe it's almost December.

NaNo: end of week 1, start of week 2.

I do not know how coherent I am going to be doing a blog, so I'll say that my brain feels something like this:

As I said before, I'm using NaNo to finish or make serious headway on stories I've already started, so I'm bouncing between novels and counting everything I write toward my NaNo words. It is day 8 and I have written 25,810 words so far this month.

O_O

I don't know what it is about NaNo--maybe so many people writing and so many of my friends writing so much that the part of me that loves writing challenges kicks into high gear--but it is a great time for me, personally, to reach goals I've been struggling with during the year.

Right now, my characters are all clamoring for attention and they won't. shut. up. This is a good thing, considering I've spent a good half of the year begging them to talk to me, but they won't shut up to the point where I haven't slept much this month and my eye keeps getting a twitch from lack of sleep. Or maybe all the caffeine.
 
NaNoWriMo is for some people; it works for some people, and if you're on the sleep-deprived crazy train with me, I'm sorry. Er, I mean GOOD FOR YOU! >_>

But if you are one of those lovely writers not participating, GOOD FOR YOU too! Part of writing is knowing what you want to do and what you're up for doing, and every single person writes differently. Last year, my pathetic attempt at a NaNo novel fell horribly flat, but it was good for me because I got back to work on the book I really wanted to finish.

So I'd like to take a moment to cheer on all of you doing NaNo--you can reach your goals!--and a moment to thank all of you not doing it for having patience with those of us who are.

You are all awesome. :D

Happy First Day of NaNo!

For those of you not doing NaNo, HAPPY NOVEMBER!

For those of you doing NaNo, HAPPY NANO! How is your first day going? Feeling good? Excited? Nervous?

Since I'm "cheating" this year and working on projects I already have going, I'm doing my word count based off of anything new I write this month for those projects. So far today, that's only 150 words. ;) I'm off to a late start. My husband talked me through something this morning, preventing me from chopping 4,000 words that I wrote this weekend. Then he said, "It's like Disney said. Keep moving forward!" And that's what I'd already been telling myself. Keep moving forward, keep moving forward...

And look, someone has it on youtube! So for your first day of NaNo, here is your Disney moment of "keep moving forward" from Meet the Robinsons.





Or you could go with Dory from Finding Nemo and instead of saying "just keep swimming" say, "Just keep writing, just keep writing..."

You can do it!!

I'm heeeere! A brief update on NaNo, Awakenings, and a quick Grammar Daze of Simple Past Tense Vs. Past Perfect Tense

*checks date of last blog post*

*winces*

I have been writing my books like a madwoman and that has consumed all of my brain energy. I pull up my blog from time to time and stare at it in a braindead sort of way and then get back to writing my novels. Where does the time go? Honestly, how can it already be almost November? (And NaNoWriMo, for those doing it! I'm Laura_Josephsen on NaNo. For those of you doing it, I'd love to find you on there! I'm not going to be using it traditionally this year. Most years, I start a novel from scratch, but I already have several that desperately, desperately need to be finished, so I'm going to be setting my word count goals on completing stories instead of starting them. ;) I know, this is technically cheating, but if I can use the motivation of a word goal for NaNo to help me finish things, I'll consider it a success.

My husband, after watching me do NaNo the last three years in a row, refers to it as "NaNoLoseYourMindo," and anyone who has participated in it before knows how accurate that can feel. In honor of the fun and yet mind-sucking month of crazed writing, I've made this badge/icon/award thing for any of you participants. In honor of you and the upcoming month, feel free to grab this and plop it on your blog or whatever.

Next, my co-author on the Restoration series, Faith King, and I are selling our few remaining copies of Awakenings version 1.0, since version 2.0 was just released. For information on that, you can see Faith's post about it here: Awakenings 1.0 Collectible Copies

And because I am sooooo dreadfully behind on blogging and my Grammar Daze posts, this week's month's Grammar Daze is going to be on simple past versus past perfect tenses. These are something I see confused a lot--mostly, people (I am guilty of this too) get so caught up in writing their simple past stories that they forget to put appropriate things in past perfect tense.

Simple past is the tense that the vast majority of stories use.

Simple Past Tense: My vampire squirrel attacked unsuspecting citizens once the sun went down.

The verbs are in simple past. So if you're using simple past to tell your story (rather than present tense, which some people use), this is going to be what's happening right now in the story. Your vampire squirrel just, at this moment, attacked these people.

However, if, in the narrative, you're telling someone that your vampire squirrel did this yesterday, or last month, or a year ago, you change it to being past perfect, where you basically add "had" or "have" before the verbs.

Past Perfect Tense: My vampire squirrel had attacked unsuspecting citizens once the sun had gone down.

A lot of the times I see this missing (or miss this in my own stories) is when a chapter or a scene starts out by backtracking, but not using the proper tense. For example:

"After three days, the characters were sick to death of tromping through the mystic swamp. Their first day, they were bitten by so many giant mosquitoes that their eyes almost swelled shut, and then the local witch made an appearance and tried to turn them all into bananas."

And maybe there's a bunch of this, telling what the characters had been doing those first three days, and then the story picks up with the characters NOW. The problem is that this started with "After three days," which implies that those three days are already gone. That means this first paragraph should have said:

"After three days, the characters were sick to death of tromping through the mystic swamp. Their first day, they had been bitten by so many giant mosquitoes that their eyes had almost swelled shut, and then the local witch had made an appearance and had tried to turn them all into bananas."

Some people have pages and pages of this, and so you just need to pay careful attention to what time your current story is in and whether it might be better to take the sequence in chronological order. You could put this entire thing in simple past tense if you were only to take out "after three days" at the beginning and move it until after all the stuff they did during the first few days. It would then look like this:

"Their first day in the mystic swamp, they were bitten by so many giant mosquitoes that their eyes almost swelled shut, and then the local witch made an appearance and tried to turn them all into bananas. After three days, the characters were sick to death of tromping through the swamp."

I hope that makes some sense.

And that's all from me for today! I have to get back to writing Story A so I can work on my co-written part of Story B this weekend. My poor co-author put up with me totally neglecting our story last weekend because the characters of Story A were eating my brain. Yes, I have Zombie Characters. (Okay, no, they are not literally zombie characters, because that is not my thing, but the way they consume my brain, sometimes I wonder. ;))

I hope you all have a FABULOUS weekend!

P is for Persephone

Dearest darling Persephone,

I am writing a letter to you under "P" because it is your name, even though I'm much more used to thinking of you as Sephie. I have other plans for "S." Or I did. As I type this letter, I can't remember what my original "S" plans were. Drat. I shall still save "S" because I have another idea anyway.  Perhaps it was even my original idea.

Annnnyway. You have been one of my favorite characters to write, and you weren't supposed to ever exist. A bunch of my friends were doing NaNoWriMo in 2009, and I was not going to do it. NaNo2008 had been exhausting. As in it-ate-my-brain exhausting. But Emma was so excited about doing it, and Kate had this huge story planned out, and Faith was writing her book, and suddenly it seemed all of my friends were jumping on the NaNo bandwagon. Then in October I mentioned the tentative possibility of joining in, but said that I didn't really have anything to write, and Faith said to me, "What if I gave you prompts? Like this!" She proceeded to throw five random prompts at me: sensei, some mushrooms, stack of paper, a spatula, and a duck.

From there, your story was born. It did, in fact, include a sensei, some mushrooms, a stack of paper, a spatula, and a duck, and many, many other things.

You were snarky and bold and very blunt. You made mistakes. You loved your family. You gave me ridiculously long chapter titles to go with the ridiculously long title of your book. You actually made me write something that was not fantasy, just a good ol' slice-of-life story. You surprised me in some awesome ways. Your whole family did, really.

I will always treasure your adventure and the things you showed me through it.  So thank you, dear Sephie, for your story. I'm looking forward to the time when I can share it with others.

Fondly,
The Author Whose Mind You Ate One November (And In Whose Mind You Have Remained Ever Since)


*I've found that sometimes characters who impact me the most are the ones that came out of nowhere. What about with you? Do you have a character who surprised you a lot or really impacted you in unexpected ways  when you wrote them?

**How are all of you A-Zers doing?  Does your brain feel like a giant puddle of jelly yet? I'd send everyone chocolate, but alas, I think the only way I could manage that would be if I owned a chocolate factory.  Which I do not.  So I will send virtual chocolate from my virtual chocolate factory.  *sends virtual chocolate to everyone*

C is for C.S. Lewis and Cassiopeia

Dear C.S. Lewis,

My mom read chapters of The Chronicles of Narnia to me and my little sister every night before bed when I was growing up. I loved fantasy from the very beginning, and you brought me to this magical world over and over again. By the time I was nine or ten, I was reading them myself—over and over again.

I know that these books influenced me. I know that they still do influence me. As many books as I've read over the years, your Narnia books will always be the ones that built a framework for my abundant love of fantastical tales.

Thank you for that.

Sincerely,
A Fan





Dear Cass,

I think out of the six sisters that were in my 2009 NaNo Novel, you got the short-end-of-the-name stick. Yes, you all had names from Greek mythology, but you probably had it the roughest as a little girl. Aside from the nasty nickname kids came up with, you also had to learn to spell Cassiopeia. I couldn't even write that out correctly for a while! I kept swapping E for I or mixing up vowels at the end.

I'm giving you a mention here today because you were the sister that I felt I knew the least when I wrote this novel.  (Which was still more than most characters when I start a book--it was crazy how fully-formed all of you guys were when you dropped into my head that October.)  But when I went back after NaNoWriMo to read everything I'd written, I was very surprised to find that there were several little things about you that were consistent throughout the book and that helped make you unique—things that I hadn't even realized I'd written. People might think that I'm crazy for not knowing exactly what I wrote, but perhaps those who have written a novel in a month will understand that sometimes when all of those words are coming out, you really don't remember.

And I have to tell you, it was an awesome experience to see everyone true to character and personality, but it was especially awesome with you, since you were the one I was most worried about.


Thanks for being you (and sorry about the awful childhood nickname),
The Rambling Writer



*Two questions for today:

1. Is there a particular author who has influenced you a great deal?

2. Is there anything you've ever written—no matter how small—that helped build your story/characters, and you didn't realize it was there until you were rereading it?

Beware: November Approacheth

November is National Novel Writing Month, shortened to NaNoWriMo, or just NaNo.  I've discussed it in previous blog posts, but if you don't know what it is and don't care to go searching through my old blog posts, it is when people from all around the world jump on board the train of insanity and work on writing an entire novel of at least 50,000 words in one month.

It is a lot of fun.

NaNo has already begun in some places around the world.  In my neck of the woods, NaNo starts in 6 hours, 56 minutes, and 21 seconds. (No, I'm not obsessive.  The NaNo homepage has a countdown clock.)

Basically, thousands and thousands of people all around the world are now going through some of the following (there were too many examples to fit into one drawing):



I would like to take the opportunity to talk about how it is okay to write poorly and keep moving forward.  I know there are some people who will scrap an entire section of writing if they make mistakes in it.  I know there are other people who will spend ages on one scene and try to make it absolutely perfect before moving forward.

But nobody I know writes a perfect first draft.  It is okay to have mistakes.  It's okay to have misspellings and bad grammar and to end sentences with prepositions.  Because your first draft isn't going to be your only draft.  You can go back and fix things later.  You can nitpick to your heart's frustration content.  You don't even have to do it right away.  In fact, sometimes you'll catch more mistakes and find new ways to smooth out your writing if you step back from it for a while after you write it. 

This is a very important thing to know if you're writing a novel in one month, because if you do NaNo and you stop to fix every little thing, you may not finish your book.  Of course, you may be one of those people who can fix everything and still churn out 100,000 words.  Find out how you write best, and then go for it.

No matter what you're writing and no matter if it takes you a month or three years, it's okay to take chances.  Make mistakes.  Be daring.  Be crazy.  Write outside of your box.  If you must go back and edit as you're writing, then go back and edit, but keep in mind that we are often our own worst critics.  Something that you've been staring at for a month might seem to be the most horrible piece of writing you have every seen, but it really might not be as bad as you think.  In fact, it might be a very solid scene.  If you give yourself some time, you might see it from a different light.

Above all, have fun exploring your story.

(And good luck out there to all my fellow Wrimos!)

(6 hours, 52 minutes, and 10 seconds left for me!  *still not obsessive*)