About a year ago, I received an email from a college-going complete stranger on MySpace who had been recommended my first book, The Other Side of What, because a friend of his thought the storyline of the lead character sounded a bit too much like his own life. We corresponded very briefly, and while I was flattered, I hopefully convinced him that the book was not based on any events in his life because (1) I had never met this person and (2) We established I wrote the majority of the book before those certain events in his life had even taken place. I think he was disappointed.
By today, I should be over 21,000 words to be on track according to the NaNo Calendar. I hate to admit it, but I’m just over 14,000.
Cheryl Anne Gardner over at PodPeep recently posted about quality vs. quantity, and I totally agreed with her from the start. The word count target on the calendar just [...]
Well, it’s Day 5 of NaNoWriMo and I was off to a good start, but the calendar I posted in my Day 1 post is catching up with me as far as word count goes. I need to be at 8335 words by midnight tonight, and right now I’m about 1,000 short. I’ve yet to [...]
Did you sleep at all last night? After only passing out candy to about 16 trick ‘r’ treaters, rushing outside during the commercials in the Roseanne Halloween Marathon on Nick at Nite to take down Halloween decor so it didn’t go missing in the night, and making sure all the clocks were set back, I sat down at 12:01am this morning like many others across the country participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year and wrote the words: “Chapter 1.”
Many of you know it as NaNoWriMo for short and it’s fast approaching! While the official site is more of a support blog offering forums, hints, tips, and more, it’s been going strong for 10 years. Participants begin on November 1st with only one goal in mind: write a 175 page novel (at least 50,000) words in one month. It’s more about enthusiasm than craft, and yes, much of the work written will be “crap.” But here is NaNoWriMo’s answer for why you should do it anyway…
Last weekend I finished reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Brown is one of the few authors these days who I will drop everything to read. In the past Anne Rice and Stephen King held such power over me. While my tastes in reading have changed over the years, there are other authors who I still feel the same way about, but there aren’t many.
Houghton Mifflin publishes a popular book called 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. While perusing the list, there are numerous words I’d have to ask someone to use in a sentence for me because I know I don’t use them in everyday language and I have no idea what they mean. There are exquisite words like gerrymander, lugubrious, obsequious, quotidian, and usurp. You can read the entire list for yourself by clicking on the title above, but if you love words like I do then be sure to grab your dictionary first! Senior editor Steven Kleinedler states, “If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”
I’ve been a Jann Arden fan ever since I first heard “Insensitive” on the radio. Last year, I discovered Jann likes to keep journals and has even published some of her writing. So I purchased a copy of her selected journals called if i knew, don’t you think i’d tell you.
To the uninitiated, writing books for children is easy. You put a few words on the page and add some pictures. How hard can that be?
Often, authors have the perfect title for a book before they’ve written a single word of the story. Others never name a novel till the very end. I’m guilty of the first. I’m also guilty of changing a title a hundred times while writing the actual novel. I’ve gone through about eight titles for my current manuscript I’m working on.
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