word count – Marina Skynnar- Author

Giving of Thanks- The End is in Sight

Almost done with the first draft

I have to hand it to the NaNoWriMo challenge. Other than when I reinjured my ankle and wallowed for five days in my pain and stupidity, I’ve actually written every single day.

Some days it’s only a couple hundred words, but it’s given me a good building block to get something written every single day. Even if I’m not sharing it here, I am getting it done!

Will definitely need the help from my partner in crime cleaning up the “battle” scene. It’s not really a battle, but there’s a bunch of chaos and @jaybederwehl is very good at chaos!

Today was an incredible day. Almost 4k words!

Can you give me a “Hell yeah”!

Thanks!!

Anyway…. I’m a little fried now. So I’m going to stop here for the day. I’ll bring my notebook into the house though and maybe get some notes down.

I will finish the first draft by the end of the weekend!

HELL YEAH!

Have a fantastic weekend!

Well I Did it.

I committed myself on NaNoWriMo… 50k words during the month of November.

Not off to a heart pounding start. 700 some odd words the first day, not even 300 yesterday. I’m stumbling up on geography. Don’t ask me why I feel the need to make things geographically accurate in a fictitious, well mostly fictitious location.

I blame it on Harry Dresden, he is always very descriptive about where he’s at in Chicago, and where he’s going. So now I must at least give a semblance of accuracy. So today I break out topographical maps… because altitudes matter.

Also, another one of my former writing buddies is on NaNoWriMo and he’s written an impressive 4k words in the last couple of days. I’m extremely jealous. Check him out at TheMindofScott @ https://themindofscott.wordpress.com/

I will be back home within the next day or so, and hopefully this weekend will bring some inspiration.

cheers!

The Plot Thickens (at least I hope it does)

It’s one thing to have a general idea for a book. It’s totally another thing to start writing it and following the thought process. As mentioned in a previous blog that I tried doing the outline thing and found I wasn’t very successful.

I had outlined what I wanted each chapter to focus on, which characters would be involved. I was pretty impressed with myself- for about 15 minutes. I think I made it through a half of a chapter before I realized I’d already gone off the outline.

I scrapped that plan.

In this book, I’m freestyling again. I have actually no idea where the characters are going, what they’re going to say, do, think etc. In idea will pop into my brain and I start typing it out, deleting multiple times, finding the flow and then run with it.

However, without the overall plan, I wonder if I’m doing myself a disservice. For example, I mentioned in one of the puzzle blogs about a new character knocking on the door (literally- he’s knocking on a door). That’s all well and good, I like Tobias, but now I have a whole new facet to this book and the storyline. It’s not going to bring me off topic, but I have an entirely new avenue to explore.

I’m not writing War and Peace. I can’t have this novel be 200k words. Ask Jay, I have a tendency to get verbose. My word count is hovering at 48k and my characters haven’t even experienced a full twenty-four hours.

I envision a little less cornstarch to thicken my plot.

Have any of you combatted this issue? What’s your preferred writing method. I think narrowing it to fiction would help. I believe outlines for non-fiction might be a little bit easier to adhere to.

Cheers!