The Write Stuff.

You may have noticed a spurt in the posting activity of this page. I haven't posted since late April for good reason. Getting married on June 30 was just one of the good reasons. I've been very busy with running the shop, writing a novel, and maintaining two MySpace sites. I will from now on cross-post all my MySpace blogging with this blog, but what appears here won't necessarily appear on MySpace. Get it? Good!

My third attempt at writing a novel during Natiional Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, has been successful. I met and exceeded the goal of 50,000 words in thirty days; the actual count was 57, 172, but who’s counting?

This is the third year I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo, but only the second year I met the goal. Last year I stumbled right out of the starting gate, but that’s another story. I conned myself into thinking the idea would make a better short story. This year I was determined to make up for last year and prove to myself that the first year out was no fluke.

The good news is I had much more fun this year than the first go-round, and I think that caused the resulting words to form a much better work. It is certainly no masterpiece at this stage; I have lots of work left to do, such as fill in the plot holes, tighten up character motivation, and fill the book out to standard novel length, maybe by adding some more detailed sub-plotting.

The first year I did NaNoWriMo, I made some mistakes in the process that ultimately led to my not finishing a rewrite of the book. First of all, I let it go nearly two months before I went back into it. Then, when I read the first draft, I was so overwhelmed by some the books problems, I just let the project wither and die. Sure, I put it into proper manuscript form, corrected spelling and grammar errors and edited some passages out, but what I really needed to do was go back in and fix some major problems with the plot. I was so stumped about how to do this, I eventually gave up and went on to other, not necessarily better, things.


That will not happen this year. I am leery of taking more than two weeks away from the book this time. I’ve already gone back and written a few notes about what to take out and what to put in on the next draft. I’m also doing more in-depth character profiles and I’ll probably end up doing a scene-by-scene outline of what’s already on paper to help me see even more plot holes.

A second draft of this book will get done, and maybe a third, a fourth, or tenth, if need be. This book has great potential, even as a series perhaps, but right now it’s still in it’s infant stages, as is my writing ability. I have much to learn about writing, it’s true, but Tony Hillerman once told me that writing a novel is hard, yes, and I’ll want to give up six hundred times, but he said, “the secret is to never give up, keep writing.” Whenever I start feeling like I doubt my abilities, I remember these words, shake off my doubts, and keep writing.

For video fun, check out this strange ad Charles Bronson did for a Japanese men's hygene product: