THERE

50,037 words.

And the second novel’s finished! (Well, actually, it’s the fourth, but that’s beside the point.)

At last.

Nearly there

1866 words left.

And the second novel’s almost finished; one more chapter to go.

Yippie-ki-yi, if all goes well.

Progress

4500 words away from finishing, and it may so happen that I finish the second novel as well.

What an achievement that would be.

On another note, I’m thinking about quitting my job. What do they say to beginning writers? Don’t quit your day job? And yet.

One can dream, can’t one?

How to bring this blog to life again

Maybe I need to post some information on the progress of the novels.

Here’s what I said on NaNoWriMo a day or so ago, discussing a mini-block:

Before I started writing this morning, I was totally lost, that the novel was floundering because, though I should be moving towards the high point, more and more suspects just keep popping up their heads and waving their hands and saying “See me here!” And when I was writing that I was 3000+ words behind.

But I sat down and started to write. Not all of it was good, I promise you. A lot of it was repetition — I’d done the same thing before, earlier in the week, But as I wrote, something happened. I found out who the murderer was! And it came to me so naturally it was as though I really and truly was solving the mystery myself.

I think this ending is going to be better (messier, for sure, but better) than the ending of Night Into Day, where I knew all along who the murderer was but where I cannot for the life of me figure out yet why he murdered two people the way he did. That book is going to take work — and it was the favourite of the three, if you can imagine. So, of course, will this one; but though I liked this one least, it has come off best so far.

Yippee.

NaNoWriMo is the best thing I know for breaking writer’s block. The need to write almost 2000 words a day overcomes all obstacles, from lack of inspiration to the writing of complete dreck. Dreck can always be deleted. The point is to write.

So maybe I’ll start writing about writing. I know this is boring. I’ll try to keep it a little lively.

Broke 40,000 today. I would like to break 42,000, as I have only 5 days left to write and I want to take some of the pressure off later.

Well, there it is.

Memed!

See, I wouldn’t do this for anybody else, but this meme came from home (Home, Bahamas), from zonk, and so I’ll succumb. I was tagged on my moribund livejournal blog, which is very near to being made redundant, so I directed people here.

So here goes.

1. When I was seven I started a series of adventure novels about a group of teenagers called the Tremendous Ten. I created their books out of a large sketch-pad () by folding it four times so that I had books that were 32 pages long. Then I drew the covers of the books and illustrated them. I imagine that was the way I outlined in those days. Nancy Drew meets Secret Seven. I kept writing those books until I was about twelve (that was the last time I remember writing them), though I graduated to making them out of 8 1/2 x 11 typing paper folded over and stapled down the side. I always illustrated them first, and then hoped to finish the stories later. The first book, which introduced the characters, was a kidnapping caper. The heroine, who was rich and spoiled and thoroughly unlikeable (and telling the story in the first-person singular too) was kidnapped and rescued by the down-to-earth po’ boy who’d just been ridiculed for getting a scholarship to attend her swanky school.

Oh, and. Most of the main characters were white. When I was seven, I had yet to see a main character in anything who wasn’t.

Fat Albert was a few years down the road.

2. I grew up communicating with alter egos. These were not the same as imaginary friends, because I turned into them when I went to sleep, or when I imagined myself having a different life from the one I was already in. The first one, and my favourite, was a tall tough guy. You must forgive me; I met him when I was, oh, five or so. He hung around until I got to high school, but he left me when I got my first boyfriend.

3. I wanted to be a horsewoman and own a stable. I talked my way into riding lessons when I was 11 and fell in love with two ponies at the stables I rode at: a bay mare (an inveterate kicker) and a tough-minded dun. Two years later, when the dun was up for adoption, I wanted to adopt him. My father wouldn’t let me; he was looking ahead, and worried about burying him when he died. I never adopted my pony. I no longer ride.

I’d like to, though.

4. When I was 12 I started another series of novels, a trilogy. These were fantasy novels, set somewhere imaginary, or in the future, at a time of war. The story was told from three different perspectives, the perspectives of three different individuals from three different parts of the empire (there are always empires in these things). I kept writing that throughout high school and finally stopped when I went to university.

5. I like onions. I really, really like onions. Always have. When I was very small (5, 6) my favourite sandwich was made of white bread (the local equivalent of Wonder Bread), mayonnaise (had to be Hellman’s), iceberg lettuce, and onions.

Lettuce and onion sandwiches. Yum.

So now. I shall pass this on, as I’m supposed to. Let’s see:

Julie
Nic
Rik
Harry
Hedgie (this I really want to see)

Cold Snap/Snap Decision

I was planning to write a post about how the weather is changing, to mirror the one that I wrote in March, but November interfered and NaNo and travelling took over my life.

And when I got back from vacation, winter was here.

We were in New York and London, where it was warm for November. Last night it got as cold as it was in New York, with temperatures down into the 40s. Bahamian houses are not designed to keep heat in, so I imagine it was an uncomfortable night for some people; I imagine that for others, though, it was an amorous night. My mother’s family has many people in it who were born in August — products of the first cold snap. I imagine there’ll be a goodly number next year too.

And here’s the snap decision, not so snappy: I’m thinking I’ll switch over to WordPress by the end of the year. Keeping up two blogs is difficult, and if I’m going to upgrade, I’ll do it at WordPress rather than at Blogger.

My mind is 90% made up. If you want to make an impact on the other 10%, now’s the time. Otherwise, bookmark the other blog.

A little something while on vacation

Culled from Julie.

Dylan Thomas! You scored 75 Demeanour, 63 Debauchery, 54 Traditionalism, and 90 Expression!

Man! Do you love to party or what! If it’s not fun, you probably haven’t done it in a while. But that doesn’t mean you’re not serious about some things. You are a person with deep passions and a respect for beauty and craft. The world is a better place for having you in it. Too bad you won’t be around that long. Drink up! You’re masterpiece is “Under Milkwood”.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Demeanour You scored higher than 99% on Debauchery You scored higher than 99% on Traditionalism You scored higher than 99% on Expression

Link: The Which Famous Poet Are You Test written by Torontop on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Yesterday: downtime

Having finished the first draft of Night Into Day (NaNo 2004) for real on Monday, I didn’t write a word yesterday. Rather, I went and dug up the draft of Bladderwater, NaNo 2005. I am currently some way behind, but I expect that to change when I get into writing Bladderwater. But first a little about the novels, and about their differences.

Three years ago, I decided to stop waiting for inspiration to hit me and to write a novel. Now I’ve been working on a Big Novel, a good-size literary novel in the Lamming-Lovelace-Morrison tradition, for some time now, off and on — more off than on, but it’s something that’s not easy to do in your so-called spare time, and when you do, do it it’s not guaranteed to get you more than critical recognition, if you’re lucky. So I thought, let me take this idea that’s been rolling around in my head for a year or two and make it happen. The idea? Something that came to me when I was reading Anne Perry’s Victorian mysteries (more Monk than Pitt). I don’t know about other people, but I read those books more for the atmosphere than for the mysteries. In most cases I can’t remember the mysteries at all, especially the Pitt ones (except for the first, The Cater Street Hangman, because Perry broke a couple of taboos in it; Monk does better, because when you first meet him he’s amnesiac and the rest of the series involve his recovering bits and pieces of his memory as well as falling in love and getting married). What I do remember are the characters, the places, the politics and the other peculiarities of the time. Sometimes Perry goes overboard, like when she’s describing pickled(?) eels; it sounds like she’s just come from the library. But on the whole the formula works.

And I thought it would work well for a mystery series set in The Bahamas. People don’t tend to think real people live there or that bad things happen there; most people tend to buy wholesale the images we have put out there and they have no idea that there are cities behind the beaches. They don’t know we have a very high murder rate per capita, or that we have a major immigrant problem, or that racism is an integral part of our past, or that tourism itself creates demands among the population that are usually unrealistic. So a murder mystery series featuring characters who are grappling with these realities, I thought, would work.

In 2003 Jazz Stephenson was born, fully formed, savagely depressed, and half-blind. Trim Romer wasn’t in my first imaginings, but he was around before I started writing the book, and he has kept growing on me. I wrote the first one, the first full draft, before I ever thought about participating in NaNoWriMo, finished it in a year, and spent a lot of the next year rewriting and polishing. By November 2004, I had the first five novels of the series outlined in brief and I had already begun the second in the series. But I wanted to hit that 50,000 word limit so much that I decided to take part in NaNo, writing from scratch the fourth mystery in the series, the one that ends up being Night Into Day.

Last year, going backwards, I worked on the third mystery in the series. This was because I had already begun the second, and again I wanted to hit the 50,000 word limit and to do it within the rules so I could officially “win” NaNo. The difference between Year 1 and Year 2 was that I decided to try and write Bladderwater organically. The first book, Fire in a Dead Man’s Eye, was very closely outlined — a first for me. The main reason was that when you’re a writer (and a reader) of literary novels plot is something that comes from the characters and their conflicts, not something that trammels your characters. But a mystery story is different. You need a problem, and you need to solve it, and you need your characters to be shown solving it, and sometimes you need some action as well, unless you’re writing a Christie-style cozy. Nassau, Bahamas is not an appropriate town for a cozy. Though everybody knows everybody’s business, we don’t tend to resolve our differences in such a way that the solution can be kept under wraps, and we do tend to become physical, even violent, when solving things. So I needed to study novel form and plot arcs and Fire followed the rules. At the very least I wanted to know who the victim was and who killed him, and my killer was very carefully worked out.

Night Into Day was less tightly outlined, but it still followed the three-act novel structure, with high points and climax and resolution. (Okay, so the climax is currently lame, and the resolution is akin to the popping of a balloon, deflating while you blink at the noise, but hey, it’s NaNoWriMo, and I can fix that later.) I knw who the killer was all along, and it was (and still is) a matter of writing it so that the reader can figure it out along with Jazz and Trim.

Bladderwater is a completely different matter. Last year I took Chris Baty’s No Plot No Problem mantra totally to heart, with the rsult that I still don’t know for sure who the murderer is — and I’ve just reached the first-act climax. This is the way I like to write, but it has its difficulties; there are days when you’re stumped, not knowing where to go now, because you find yourself surrounded by characters who all are making demands, but you have to find your way out of the crowd and into the clear somehow.

Now, because I spent the first half of November writing the end of Night, I have not thought much about where Bladderwater is going. So here I am, after a day’s rest, about to start writing Bladderwater again. A new body is turning up, thank heaven, and that’ll be good for a thousand words or so, but after that? who knows.

You can join the journey on TUF, if you’re a member (chances are, if you’re reading this, you are). Backstory will go here in a day or so. It’s a different password from Night, so if you want it, let me know.

There it is, folks. Hope you’re not bored to tears by all this. But of course, if you were, you could always have navigated away from this blogsphere, couldn’t you?

Cheers.

One Down!

I’m coming to the end of Night Into Day. The ending couldn’t be more lame, but hey. What do you expect? No plot, no problem.

I’ve decommissioned the password on the front page of this one. The passwords for the chapters themselves, however, stay.

20,895 words to date. Toodles.

NaNo No One Completed!

Yes, well, pretty much what the title says.

Go here to find out more.

You’ll need a password to read the chapters themselves.

Pix from NYC

Central Park on a glorious unseasonal day.

The look of this site

Expect the appearance of this site to change every now and then. I’m really not sure what I want this to look like, and I’m too cheap to invest in the upgrade to make CSS work for the public. So my apologies in advance if you’re disoriented, but it’ll settle down eventually.

I kind of like this one, to be honest.

Travel tomorrow

Vacation started today. As is one’s habit when one is on vacation, one stopped by the office and spent an hour or two there, in the air conditioning and the fluourescence.

Thank heaven one is going to another country tomorrow.

New York and London, here we come!

And I’m ahead in my wordcount. Not very ahead, but enough to keep me happy. If I use this vacation wisely, and hit over 2000 words every day, I’ll be well set to return to work with 10 more days to go.

NaNo Update

Well, I’ve decided that I need to participate in the TUF NaNo sharing, so I’m going to post my progress (words written in November) to the TUF forum. But the story’s almost done, so for people who want to find out what came before, they can check out Scavella’s Blogsphere over at WordPress.com, which is where I’ve put the backstory. They’ll need a password to access it, though, so feel free to PM me on PFFA, TUF or NaNoWriMo. Or you could try emailing, though I make no promises about that.

Cheers.

NaNoWriMo 2006

Well, peeps, it’s crunch time. I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo again, after winning (i.e. completing 50,000 words in 30 days or fewer) for two years. This year, I’m finishing the two novels I started.

Since this is not my active blog, I figure it’s untrafficked enough to post bits of the nanovels here. In fact, I’ve set up some pages to provide the backstory to what I’m writing. What I’ll probably do is post some of the current stuff here on the front page; the backstory’s password-protected. Shoot me a PM on PFFA, TUF or NaNoWriMo and I’ll shoot you a password.

So far, I’m lagging behind on wordcount, so bye-bye bloggie, hello novel.

Fall back, spring forward

No, I’m not talking about time-changes here. I’m talking about word-counts. Yesterday I managed to add only 469 words to my total, which places me behind; that’s the falling back. Today I intend to fix that and spring forward.

So there.

So here’s the widget now

Still at 4141 words. 4 1/2 more hours to go. Can I make today’s goal? YES, I CAN!!

Today

is a tough day. Woke at 5:30 as usual, came out to write, was dry. Now it’s 7 and I’ve written only 346 words.

Somebody tell me where the remaining 1273 words are coming from.

At least the number I’ve stopped on is pretty — red and white candystripey:

Today’s Progress

It has begun

And I’m slightly ahead, which is a good thing, I suppose; I could easily fall behind tomorrow.