Words for the day: 1,441
Total words: 19,863
Not much to say. I may have crossed a threshold, and figured something out.
Now saving my words for the NaNoWriMo.
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Tag: novel
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NaNoWriMo Day 11
Posted at 7:35 am , on November 12, 2019
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NaNoWriMo Days 7–10
Posted at 9:10 pm , on November 10, 2019
Photo by KIM DAE JEUNG on Pexels.com
Words for Day 7: Zero
Words for Day 8: 1,573
Words for Day 9: 3,542
Words for Day 10: 4,595
Total words: 18,422
Late fall deep freeze crept in over the last few days, and I ran out of steam (or was it time) for any writing on Day 7. So it was an accidental day off; however, a little brain rest can always be helpful.
I spent some of my writing time over the last few days doing something I’m not sure I was supposed to be doing during NaNoWriMo, considering one of the mantras of the month is to write, write, write, always moving forward to get more words down. I went back and did a little editing, adding and expanding on earlier sections.
Yes, there definitely was a net gain, but I did have to delete some words. It felt very much not in the spirit of the month when, after about an hour of writing and getting down a few hundred (maybe almost 1,000) words, I removed some of the no longer relevant passages and found myself suddenly at a net zero.
Words, they come and go. Oh, well.
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NaNoWriMo Day 6
Posted at 10:19 pm , on November 6, 2019
I’m using this image, which I found searching for the word “breathe,” which I mean in a positive way, though this could be verging on “drown.” Ambiguity.
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.comWords for the day: 1,477
Total words: 8,712
Still behind the NaNo schedule, but I’m happy with the day’s results. One of the things that I reminded myself to do tonight is give a scene a chance to breathe. So I went back a few paragraphs from where I had left off last night, and realized that I needed to break up a character’s paragraph-long quote. That allowed that character to test and measure other characters’ reactions to what she was saying, as well as allowing other characters to say things — thus slightly changing the direction of the conversation as I had written it yesterday (characters! with their own thoughts!).
Perhaps most importantly, it allowed me the space to insert moments in which my main character could witness, think, and evaluate things. This, I think, will deepen a reader’s understanding and empathy for the main character, and it allowed a quick flashback for some background information that deepens the history of the main character.
So in some ways, I ended my writing session by getting back to where I had left off the night before, but I put down a lot of important words that lets the story breathe and the characters express their lives in new ways.
A good writing session.
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NaNoWriMo Day 5
Posted at 1:08 pm , on November 6, 2019
Photo by sergio souza on Pexels.com So Tuesday turned out to be a tough day. I squeezed out only 320 words, before I was just too tired. (even this post is a day late)
New total: 7,235 (just 42,765 to go!)
More tonight, I hope.
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NaNoWriMo Day 4
Posted at 10:32 pm , on November 4, 2019
Total words for Monday: 1,186
Project total so far: 6,915
Back to work — it’s the first Monday of NaNoWriMo! — so I expected to get fewer words down. According to the NaNoWriMo 50,000-word challenge, the daily average is 1,667 — so at least for today I am a little bit above average. I expect that to slip a bit.
With the writing, though, I think I still know what’s going on — so that’s a good thing.
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NaNoWriMo Day 3: Time shift edition
Posted at 9:18 pm , on November 3, 2019
Total words for Sunday: 2,826
Project overall: 5,729
So I think I’m sort of back on track, though even having that extra hour always throws me a little of whack. I think I probably should’ve been able to churn out more words today.
Work week returns tomorrow (Monday), and I expect my daily average to dwindle a little.
Good luck to the other NaNoWriMo-ers out there doing this amid full-time jobs and full-time life things!
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NaNoWriMo Day 2: The Lure of Research
Posted at 10:04 pm , on November 2, 2019
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Saturday. Word count: 1,981. Now I’m behind. It’s my weekend, so I was planning on cranking out some words, but I read what I wrote yesterday and knew it could be better, so I worked on that — adding some, deleting a lot of others, but after about 90 minutes I think I netted a solid dozen words that I could add to today’s count.
Then it was time to plunge forth, and I did for a while, until I wanted to learn one small thing, a tiny detail or two, that Google could help me with …
Two hours (and a lunch) later, no knew words, and I still hadn’t quite found the right fact (though I did find something else entirely, and that went right in the manuscript for +25 words). Thing is, I love looking stuff up. I love being able to find the right fact to make my fiction ring true. As a former newspaper copy editor, looking stuff up was most of the job (the rest was more or less just memorizing and implementing AP style, as well as numerous local variants).
Here’s hoping tomorrow goes better. And thank you to all the fellow writers and NaNoWriMo-ers who checked out yesterday’s post. Great to be part of a creative community, joined through the inter-webs.
NaNoWriMo total word count: 2,908
In other words, I’m already behind. Yikes!
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Day 1: NaNoWriMo and Me
Posted at 10:22 pm , on November 1, 2019
For the first time, I’m doing it. NaNoWriMo, that is.
My plan: Expand on a pair of short stories that are linked with at least 50,000 new words.
Who else has done it? How’d it go for you?
At the end of Day 1, I’ve logged about 970 words in about 90 minutes of writing. Only about 49,030 words to go.
Felt good. I tried, and failed, not to edit and re-edit a few sentences. Trying to get into the frame of mind of just putting words down.
Wish me luck.
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Review: North and Central by Bob Hartley
Posted at 10:50 am , on January 9, 2018
We had a Zenith television when I was a kid. It was big, bigger than me. When we wanted to change the channel, we had to get up and turn the dial. When the plastic dial broke, or at least the part that connected it to the channel mechanism on the TV, then we superglued the broken bit of plastic back together. We used the dial until it broke, again. We superglued it again. This kept going on until the plastic dial couldn’t be repaired anymore. Then we just risked cutting our fingers against the sharp-edged plastic of the now-exposed channel changing mechanism. We pressed our fingers against it, twisted our wrists and changed the channel. There were only 13 stops on the dial, and only four stations: ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. We made do and we kept that TV long after friends started to buy Sony Trinitrons. Eventually, we got something from Panasonic.Bob Hartley’s second novel, North and Central (Tortoise Books, 240 pages, $16), is set in a Chicago bar whose clientele consisted mostly of Zenith factory workers and who, no doubt, would mock my use of “clientele” to describe them. “Drinkers,” perhaps, is better? “Strugglers,” perhaps, too, as Zenith is on the decline due to competition from Japan—the entire neighborhood is rough shape. Another name for those workers could be “Trump voters,” which is more about when I read the book than when it was written or its setting a few decades ago in the 1970s.
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