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.