J C GALE

Today is the last day of NaNoWriMo if you live in Australia, specifically my time zone.

I’m happy to report I managed to achieve my personal (secret) goal, the one I wouldn’t have told anyone I was going for if I hadn’t made it (hey, Author’s prerogative)…

70,000 words !!!

…Boom Boom Boom… fireworks go off and a pretty girl jumps out of the cake… eek, don’t tell the missus!

I’m happy and yet exhausted. I can’t believe the legs this simple story has developed. I’m particularly proud of the fact the 70,000 actually make sense.

That’s no easy feat especially on a deadline.

I need to take a few days off now before I collapse to the ground, a heap of wordless jelly…

Seriously I need to recharge and slowly wind back up into the editing of Impatience. For now it’s a wonderful feeling to not only complete NaNoWriMo but to have utterly smashed it.

J.

Day 21 I hit my goal word count of 50,000.

NaNoWriMo done

Wow, what a feeling. For a while there I wasn’t sure I would make it and then I became swept up in my story and the words flew from my fingers. I must admit I’m quite tired from this challenge. It’s hard to write a decent volume every day as life often gets in the way. I’ve pushed myself before with a few short stories and written to deadlines however they were small in comparison. It doesn’t really compare.

Yet I did it. I feel like I’ve achieved something tangible, proven my ability to write and it feels oh so good!

I’m happy, relieved the weight is off my shoulders. I’m excited by this story, it has really developed strong legs. I think I’m roughly 50% through the telling and can’t wait to get down the full version. Even though I know what is going to happen, at a high level, the details are fascinating to me.

I’m off to write some more now…

J.

Well hello there my avid readers!

It’s late on day 15 and I’m happy to report I just hit 35,000 words. Only 15,000 more to go

I estimate my story is approximately 40% through the plot. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to cruise right past the 50,000 NaNoWriMo goal without any problems *phew*. Right now it feels to me like I’m leaning somewhat toward quantity not quality however the story is solid enough and I’m confident with some future revisions it will become more presentable.

NaNoWriMo is a hard slog, especially as I know I’m writing so fast I’m making lots of mistakes, like names of places and characters are sometimes transposed or just plain wrong. Thank god for Word spelling and grammar checking. I spent two hours today fixing all the small problems so far, as knowing they were there plain bugged me.

Apologies I haven’t blogged more, I simply haven’t had the free time of late. I’ve been maximising my boundaries of space and boundaries of time where possible. No idea what I’m talking about? If you have ten minutes why not check this out:

J.

Tonight I hit half way, that’s right 25,000 words…

I’m quite tired and yet feeling elated… !

J.

17,303 words and in the middle of a large bit.

I have been re-reading some of the scene’s as I go and in the majority I seem to be getting the plot points and character development across reasonably clearly.

J.

Well at the end of Day 5, I’m a smidge over 11,000 words in.

This is awesome.

The story is strong, the characters are *speaking* to me, in fact they won’t shut up.

Writing can be awesome. It isn’t always but when you hit the right pace and feel for a scene it is amazing, such a good feeling.

J.

It’s day 1 of NanoWriMo and so far I’ve written 2987 words for four hours of focused work.

Not bad! I’m very happy I spent most of the last week doing layout and plotting the story in point form. This morning when I beheld the blank page I knew exactly where to start. Every word is one closer to 50,000 and to be honest, without meaning to sound arrogant, I think I will blitz this.

Time will tell I guess.

Right now my only real concern is writing late at night on work days. I find it hard to write well when I’m quite tired so I hope to get down larger volumes through the weekends to cater for this.

One thing I will say is I’m very happy with this story, it’s really different and very appealing to me (no spoilers!).

Jase.

Welcome to the new layout! I received some feedback suggesting the old one was a little hard to read and we can’t have that now can we? Besides, I have felt for some time this place needed a bit of a facelift. Hey Presto

A huge thank you to all who offered forth their opinions on my conundrum. This week I have really struggled to make my mind up as I considered a number of plot concepts. It took the weekend to throw caution to the wind and simply let my mind go for it. The end result is NanoWriMo here I come. I spent most of today thinking through a back story for my imminent novel. I have to admit, I’m excited by this project as it is something completely different.

Right now I feel NanoWriMo is:

Excitingly new

Scary

Challenging

Overwhelming

Daunting

Exhausting

Rewarding

Inevitable

I have so much work to do in preparation for Nov 1 and then so much more to do for the 30 days. I might be insane but I am genuinely looking forward to it.

Wish me luck

November is NanoWriMo month. Now like me, you are probably thinking what the heck is a NanoWriMo? Well, for the month of November foolish self abusive authors from all around the world band together, well in spirit at least, to punch out a short novel each in 30 days.

Not impossible but not exactly convenient timing either and there lies my conundrum.

Sigh.

Truth be told, I’m making solid headway with my rework / editing of Impatience in particular and less so with Balance. It’s all a matter of free time and as a male I can only think and do one thing at a time. Only real condition is the writing must start on November 1, no earlier. This means I cannot rework one of my short stories into a book. It cannot be a pre-existing piece of work. I also can’t hammer through book 2 of the Evolution Series (the one after Balance) as I have already started that and to be honest it will undoubtedly be way too large for this exercise, best guess for now is 150 – 200K words.

So pros and cons for me to do NanoWriMo 2010 are:

Pro:

All writing, even insanely rushed short (50 – 60k words) still add to writing experience.
Being creative is challenged and yet so rewarding! I’d love to produce another manuscript to share with my proof readers before Christmas.
I already have a basic concept in mind, very rough though.
Have the experience of doing a NanoWriMo month.

Cons:

I like to occasionally sleep!
Progress will stop on the editing This is more annoying than anything else as I don’t as yet have a timeline in place to begin submitting the manuscript. It’s not really a big deal I suppose, I’m mostly worried about a loss of momentum.
Over the next two weeks I would need to formalize the basic plot synopsis / outline. This isn’t really a reason more of a holy crap I need to get moving on this or else.
I won’t be able to edit this new manuscript for quite some time as the other two are locked in, next in queue.

So there you have it, in all seriousness I find the allure of NanoWriMo almost irresistible as I simply love to write. I feel that if I go for it then the editing might suffer. I’ve never been in this situation before so I don’t really know.

If you have some advice, cough it up with a comment as I have to decide in the next week one way or the other.

Thanks

During this week someone suggested I simply had to watch something on television as it was quite remarkable. At the time I was at work and kind of busy. In the past, during things like the terrible events of 9/11, I’ve always been glued to the set like a moth to a flame.

I hesitate to admit but its true, on occasion I’ve sat up all night watching the US television networks and their fascinating live feeds. This week it was the Chilean miners being brought up to the surface. Don’t get me wrong, I think that is fantastic, however do I need to celebrate the experience with them by being glued to my TV?

I for one no longer think so.

You see I have limited capacity. In IT terms, yes I just had to go there, my memory is limited and my hard drive can only cache so much. Oh dear. Anyway, my point is as I have said before I work full time and have a pretty busy family life. I’ve recently embarked on a bold new exercise regime, swimming 3 times a week and I have more books to read right now then time to do so.

In amongst all this I am burning to get my editing done. In short my life is running at capacity. I’m cool with this as ultimately it’s my decision to make it so. My brain, as it does its subconscious thing on my characters, is also flat out. I’m trying something new and using my whiteboard in my study to float idea’s in and out. It seems to help to get them written down, this adds some order to my chaotic thoughts and hopefully the books will benefit from this.

I’m sorry miners, I really am but my project came first and that night I didn’t turn to whatever channel you were on. I hope you don’t mind and good luck.

In other news, today I finished Duncan Lay’s ‘The Dragon Sword Histories’ trilogy. I have mentioned these books before so I won’t go into any detail, suffice to say this is a fresh feeling trilogy with very life like characters. One of my goals at the moment is to flesh out some of my characters in Impatience, I couldn’t have read this at a better time.

If you like fantasy, go buy this trilogy, nuff said!