November 29 November 29, 2006

Oooooh, things are interesting in Seattle. We have snow; we have ice; we have COLD. Boy, do we have cold. We also had Thanksgiving, and so did you.

Writing is going slowly. No, that’s not true. Writing goes fairly fast, that’s been the most interesting and surprising thing about NaNoWriMo. Writing just hasn’t gone consistently from day-to-day. I am at about 11,000 words, with about 40 hours left. OK, not going to make it to 50,000. But that’s ok with me. I’ll be waiting for next year.

What I have learned (so far) from NaNoWriMo this year:

If you don’t write, you don’t learn anything at all. Actually, I learned half of that last year.

Fiction has to be more realistic than life or it sounds unbelievable.

You can write 1,000 words in less than an hour if you know what you want to say.

It really does help to know the ending of your story before you start writing.

Most of the “how to write” books and articles you find are about writing genre fiction: popular romance, mystery, horror, etc.

Genres have their own sets of rules.

Lots of people write fiction, or want to.

I need to read more fiction.

That last one is a bugger. If I start a book and like it, I’m gone. I am not a chapter-a-night bedtime reader; I’m more of a read-at-one-sitting person. Reading can really interfere with the rest of my life. So could writing, if I let it.

Tuesday morning. Six-word science fiction November 7, 2006

Slate Magazine invited science fiction, fantasy and horror writers to submit a 6-word story. You can read them here. They’re pretty good. (The first one on the list is by William Shatner. My favorite is by Margaret Atwood.)

I found the link on Ursula Le Guin’s website There’s some good stuff there about the writing process.

And speaking of the writing process, I’m over 6,000 words. Not caught up but making headway. Am having to fight the temptation to throw out everything I’ve written so far and start anew. This is partly because I think what I’ve done so far is kind of dull, and also because I (everyone?) always have my best ideas while I’m working on something else. I think my solution will be to add a second, parallel narrative to augment the original story. The setting is a small town in the mountains, and the secondary story will be written from the point of view of the woods watching the story unfold.

Actually, I like that idea. Maybe I can have thinking animals.

Saturday afternoon November 4, 2006

The Finnish Bazaar is over and I am beat. It was a fun time, as always. Good food, good stuff to buy, and I won something in a raffle! I never win things. But today I did.

I’m behind in the writing but expected that. On day four I should be up around 6,000 words and I’m just shy of 3,000. Will make it up in the next few days.

OK. Naptime.

Darn! November 2, 2006

It sounds as if there was a party at Denny’s in Ballard last night. I wish I’d gone!!