I write because my passion is to tell people stories.
Stories of love and hate, of fear and hope. Stories where good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Stories of lives that are unexpected, horrible and beautiful.
I write these things because I believe they are true in real life, therefore should be in fiction too. But not matter what I write, I always seem to be asking 'why'?
Well the count down has begun. A little over three days until Christmas eve and whether you celebrate the day or not we all have a few vacation days coming up in advance of the new year.
Just wanted to take this moment to wish you all a wonderful end of the year.
Pre-Xmas Updates:
Ice Debt (novel) – Draft One complete. Draft two underway
Riot Girl (novel) – Draft one 98% complete.
Wall of Night (script) – to be blessed by exec before new years eve.
Chinese Whisperings: Red Book (Anthology) – will be released on January 1st.
We’ll chat soon.
PS: 2009 marks the end of a five year goal list for me. I’ll tell you all about them in my “2009 in Review” post.
So if you’ve been reading along, you know that on Thursday, November 24, I re-decided to win NaNoWriMo. And when I posted my re-decision on November 26, I had to write 25,000 words (half of the monthly total) in 5 days.
Now to prove my ineptitude at keeping to a daily schedule I’ve posted my word count chart from NaNoWriMo below. As you can see the last few days were interesting – the orange lines being what I actually wrote and the blue what I should have written.
And thanks to my love affair with twitter, I can give you a record of how those last few days went.
November 25th (3,742 words)
A normal ordinary day, with a lot of writing involved.
- 1380 words in 30 minutes. Now I need to get food before my lunch break is over. Only 3480 more words to meet today’s goal – sigh
- I wrote 779 in 21 minutes. Gotta pick it up. Still have 2000 words to go today.
- Today I broke the 25K mark on my #nanowrimo novel. Only half a novel left to write… in 5 days. Head-Desk-Smack (8:09 pm)
November 26th (2,007 words)
I’d made the commitment. 5,000 words a day. I could so do that. Right?
- My week 2 & 3 #nanowrimo recap. Still trying to make it for 50K by Monday. http://www.tinahunter.ca/20…(11:19 AM)
But that night I had problems with a scene, not the scene I was writing of course but a scene that was coming up and it was distracting me. I couldn’t figure out who to kill. So I turned to twitter and people actually responded – lots of people:
- #nanowrimo ’s help me chose which minor character to kill off -either will change the whole story. A) rebel leader or B) rebel leaders wife?
- Thanks 4 the votes. I guess I’m killing the Rebel leader. The wife gets surprise revenge
But in the end, I didn’t write that scene. I got close but I just couldn’t finish.
- Goodnight all. Alas it was only a #2kday My wordcount will be better tomorrow. (9:27 pm)
November 27th (3,027)
Ah, Fridays. Normally a relaxing day at the office. A good day for writing, yes. No. Not this Friday. But I still got a good word count going:
- I wrote 2701 words in 63 minutes with Write or Die. Up to 3067 for today and broke 30K total.
And I finally wrote that scene where I had to kill off a character and it looks like I didn’t need to poll the audience:
- Who knew? I got 2 the scene & both the rebel leader & his wife got killed
Then a shocking revelation about my plot, or lack there of:
- I have maybe 2k words before I officially have no more plot. And I still have 20k words left to write. I guess I’ll be winging it
November 28th (gave up – 0 words)
Yeah, I didn’t write on Saturday. The fact that I was missing a whole section of plot didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to write. I had it all planned out. But something about walking into the office felt hopeless, pointless. It wasn’t until we went out to a birthday party for a friend that I remembered that I write because I love to tell stories and that was more important that a silly word count goal (normally).
But regardless it re-inspired me to write on Sunday.
November 29th (5,690 words)
And write I did, but still wasn’t enough.
- 20k… 2 days… Can I call in sick to work tomorrow?
I didn’t, just in case you were wondering. And at the end of the day I felt like giving up once again.
- I just had a #5kday. #NaNoWriMo total at 36229. Close but I’m not going to make 50k, maybe 40k by tomorrow. Oh well, I tried.
November 30th (13,843 words)
Yet, for some reason when I got up on the morning of November 30th, I felt like I could do it. I didn’t look at the number of words I had to write I just started writing. And kept going.
It started with a hand written section of over 1,000 words written during a seminar (and surprisingly I was still able to listen to what the guy was saying – ok more like kind of):
- #NANOWRIMO update: 37,256 words. Written 1,067 so far. Now for lunch hour to bring me closer. (11:30 am)
And my lunch hour was very productive, as was my afternoon break:
- Just wrote 2000 words in 48 minutes. New #nanowrimo total after lunch is 39,256 words. Almost at 40K. W00T! (12:56 pm)
- I wrote 1178 in 28 minutes. New #nanowrimo total at 40,434. Only 9,566 words left to write in 8.5 hours. This might actually be doable. (3:30 pm)
Then I went home, tried to fix my Internet, gave up and let D do it, made supper, and then sat down for 5 hours to write. I’ll let the tweets do the talking:
- Only 6341 more words needed to hit 50k. I’ve already written 7430. 4 hours left. Fingers crossed (8:10 pm)
- 3777 words left. 2 and half hours left to go. (9:31 pm)
- 1311 words left. A little over an hour to go. Still can’t believe I’ve written 12,460 words so far today. (10:40 pm)
- I DID IT! I wrote 13,843 today alone & finished w 50,067 words total. Done & validated with 30 minutes to spare. Now 2 bed. (11:37 pm)
It’s been a roller coaster of a ride, but the funny thing was I didn’t expect to be as happy as I was. At 11:30pm I validated my novel and when I saw that purple bar with the word “Winner” I did a little happy dance.
Now this novel isn’t finished yet. I have 2 or 3 chapters left before this draft is done (and rewriting this one is going to be awful because I turned off the spell checker – yuck). But I almost have two novels written. Two novels in one year (if we ignore the fact that the other one took me 1.5 years to finish).
I’m thrilled that this is over but I have a lot of chores to do around the house to make it up to D for being so supportive of my crazy writing month. I’m very glad that in the end I didn’t get left behind.
On Sunday, November 1st, I will be participating in NaNoWriMo for the very first time.
For those of you who have never heard of it, NaNoWriMo is an annual event that takes place from November 1 to November 30. Those of us crazy enough to sign up are challenged to write 50,000 words during those 30 days. I just finished my first novel “Ice Debt” (Yeah Me!) and I want to keep up the momentum, so I’m going to use NaNoWriMo to write a new novel titled “Riot Girl”.
They say you need to prepare a few things before you start, so here is my 15 point check list:
1. A working Laptop - Check (I hope it stays that way)
2. Chips, chocolate and an assortment of junk food - Mostly Check
3. A post-it note reading: “You can do it!!” stuck to your computer – Check
4. A LOT of music organized into themes (like romantic, funny, war and instrumental) – Not yet (but this is great idea)
5. A note pad – Check
6. A handful of pens – Check
7. A big mug for Hot Chocolate -Check
8. A USB drive (or similar) to back up your work – I’m using DROPBOX for this & its great
9. The book titled, “No Plot? No Problem” – Check
10. A writing totem – Check
11. Asprin/Tylenol – Check
12. An outline for your NaNo Novel - Check (more info in week one recap)
13. A healthy stock of writing prompts to randomly insert in your story – I’m going to use Seventh Sanctum’s plot generators
14. The support of friends and family – Double Check
15. Joined a local group of folks participating in NaNoWriMo – Check
I think I’m on track to do this. Just a day and half left to go.
This post is sticky and will remain that the top of my blog until the end of November. I will keep you updated here as to my progress.
PS: I am not affiliated with any of these bands I just like their songs and think they fit in with the overall theme of this novel. The songs may change as the novel progresses.
Also, since I’m being featured as an author I thought today would be a good day to give a story away for free. So, below is a link to a story called Broadcasting Live. I’ve sent this story out many times in many different variations but it hasn’t found a home. Probably because it seems like part of a larger story but I honestly have nothing else to say about Katie. I still quite like it despite it’s age and so I would like to share this science fiction short story with you. Check it out and let me know what you think (comments are open on the page).
A friend of mine was having a bad day at work. There were a lot of challenges he had to overcome to complete a “project”.
Anyway, in an attempt to make him feel better I wrote him a little story based loosely off the information he told me. I wrote in one hour, and did no editing so please take that into consideration when reading.
Note: the people portrayed are in fact fictional and have very little or nothing in common with anyone I know or have had described to me in real life.
Anna vs. Jones
Update: fortunately/ unfortunately I have been requested by “Jones” to submit the following story to a flash fiction contest called “Creatures of the Night”. So that means I have deleted the story from my blog in case it is chosen in the contest. If it is rejected, I will post the story back on my blog for all to read.
….
Moral of the story: Trust your gut. Sometimes people really are pure evil.
