Tag: nanowrimo

Camp NaNoWriMo April 2019

I’ve decided to do Camp NaNo this month- to get some distance on my short story projects.

My top goal is 20,000 words, not fifty thousand because, with my schedule, it is very hard to get to 50k. I have about 4 stories to work on. One of them is very English – with a manor Dragon and a little girl. One is all space opera and cats. Another is based on a fairy tale, which I used, then, just lately realized that the original tale changes lead characters halfway through… so that will have to be fixed.

UPDATE: I’m on April 9th and now about 5 thousand words in. Part of this is my really extended Dragon story. I’m just letting this story unwind as it goes. I’m enjoying it which is terrific. It’s too long already to be sent to most short story markets though, so it will have to go to a novella market or be personally published. I could do a D2D publication again, but promote this one more? I don’t know. I’d like to get some beta readers before I go too far with publication on my own. I’ve read some very bad self-published books by other Canadian authors in SF.

The photos below are from close to my daughter’s high school. It was an astounding day and I got some lovely shots. I met the very elderly woman who planted that thirty foot magnolia when it was just a little twig.

Below, I’m using a new photo from Unsplash, which is a great free photo resource.

Photo by Andy White on Unsplash

http://campnanowrimo.org/campers/russetcat/projects

November Writing Initiative

November 30, 2014

At the end of the NaNoWriMo initiative.

I reached  14,038 words in November. This was an achievement for me and is more than usual.  I did some short story work and some on my novel. A ‘win’ there is 50,000 words. That’s hard to do, even for professional writers like me.  Plus, I’m doing a corporate day job, living my life, raising the child, cooking, cleaning, et cetera.  I can’t just lock myself up like people with supportive spouses can.

Also, to be fair, I got sidetracked by some television work I was doing (more on that in another post), which took a couple of weekends from me.

I highly recommend the wonderful pep talk by SF author Brandon Sanderson. I really love his analogy about the scuba diver.  If you love to write, keep writing.  I think he’s onto something there.  I’m not as happy when I’m not writing. Life keeps intruding 🙂 but it’s all material, too.

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November

Robert Sawyer announced he was going to do the National novel writing month sprint earlier today. I looked it up and decided that it sounded like a great idea. Robert is a very good SF writer and some of his work has been made into great TV as well. Check out his site at http://www.sfwriter.com (yes, he has that URL.)
So, today I signed up at http://nanowrimo.org
They suggest you try to write a 50,000 novel in the month of November. It’s a great deal of writing for a busy single mum with a corporate job, but it’s also a good challenge for me. November’s usually a hard month for me, so it could be good to be very busy.
I will try to use the initiative to finish my novel. I’m at 57889 words now. I need to get to the end. I don’t know how many words it’ll take to get to the end, but that’s what I’m aiming for.


Stettler Museum Typewriting machine from the Stettler Independent