When the clock struck midnight around the world, National Novel Writing Month kicked-off with a bang. When the clock struck midnight on the east coast, I was fast asleep. I opted to start NaNoWriMo a little later this morning. I spent an hour writing and penned 937 words – not a good pace for the 50K goal but not bad. In fact, I’m not trying to reach 50,000 words. My personal goal is just to get into the habit of writing daily. If I can write 1000 words a day, I’ll have 30, 000 written by November 30, which seems pretty reasonable to me. I can then write another 30,000 in December. So maybe I won’t win NaNoWriMo but I can achieve my goal to write a complete novel this year. And that’s good enough for now. Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? How’d the first day go? … [Read more...]
National Novel Writing Month
Well, I did it! I signed up for NaNoWriMo. What’s that you ask? It stands for National Novel Writing Month. Its a contest that takes place every November. Writers pledge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Not an easy task. That’s 1600+ words a day, which I figure is about 5 pages. And, if I’m lucky, I’ll probably only have one hour a day in which to crank out those five pages. Yeah, I’m a little crazy. Actually, I’m really excited about this task, despite the daunting nature of it. I've wanted to be a novelist since the third grade. At some point you just have to take the bull by the horns and go for it (sorry for the cliché) and that’s the whole point of NaNoWriMo, to write and write and write and edit later. It really is about cranking out 50K words in 30 days, to hell with the quality. When I was teaching composition to college freshman, I advised them to just write. To just get their draft on paper and worry about making it pretty later. So that’s what I’m going to do this … [Read more...]
New Orleans: Then and Now
My Where Were You When-esday, which will probably be the last, is dedicated to New Orleans. Not because its been five years since Katrina. And not because its been five months since the oil spill. But because its been nine years since I first visited New Orleans. My first trip was in July 2001 for the Romance Writers of America annual conference. I was there as an editor, meeting with my authors and coaching would-be authors on writing a good category romance. I had brunch at the Commander’s Palace, rode the street car through the Garden District, drank a hurricane while walking along Bourbon Street, spent time in the courtyard of my hotel journaling , and fell in love with this city whose spirit – and by that I mean ghosts, too – inspired me to write. I couldn’t wait to return to capture that inspiration once again. When Katrina hit, I feared the New Orleans I fell in love with was lost. And it was but I don’t think Katrina is to blame, at least not entirely. I think what … [Read more...]
