Monday, November 16, 2009

Maybe I Need Some New Music to Listen to

I haven't been writing nearly as much as I should be, or want to be. Although I didn't sign up for NaNo, I had thought it'd be a good time to jump-start one of the half-dozen story ideas that have been floating around in my head.

Halfway through the month and I've reread, and edited just slightly, the first page and a half of the sequel to the book for which I'm at the querying stage. [Some agents say mention if your book is part of a series, some don't want to know, but the generaly consensus, if there ever is one, seems to be that if you have a sequel planned, it doesn't hurt to work on it while querying the first one.] I've also bought new mini cassettes for my tape recorder, left a few notes on a different steampunky story there, and written a bit more in my Not Another Teen Vamp Story (where the male protag's first encounter with a vampire is nothing romantic and mysterious--I have no idea where it will go, because I want it to be a bit on the violent side, not gratuitously, though, and possibly by the time I'm done with it and have a publisher, YA vamps will be completely off the trend, but they say don't write to trends, and this is what I want to write, so if nothing else, it's practice).

Oy, that got really rather rambly there, didn't it? [Yay alliteration?]

The point is, while I've glanced over some stories and waved hello to them at a distance, I honestly can't say I have any word count to show for the past two weeks. I worked out the numbers and if I want to reach 50,000 by November 30, I should write about 3,333 words every day, which is just over 555 words per hour if I focus on writing for six hours. (Certainly not the entire time I'm at the computer, but a good chunk of time and more realistic than 8-10 hours per day.) 550 looks a lot more manageable than 3,300 words.

The title of this post was a passing thought--maybe some new music might jolt me into a creative spur. But why blame the music? I've completed three novel-length stories since 2006, so I know I can do it. I can have the self-discipline to write for 5+ hours straight. I just need to convince myself to get off my butt and do it. So I make that resolution now. I want to write 50,000 words before December 1.

To do that, I'll probably have to significantly cut down on my blog reading, which has already decreased (I swear, I probably have over a hundred writer, agent and editor blogs bookmarked under my favorites, I could never read them all in a day), but I'll probably disappear from updating CoffeeQuill, LJ, and my facebook as well (the FB games, oh, those time-eaters!). I'd say I'll be back December 1, and you might find me occasionally, but I'll be getting crafty this holiday season, which will also be time-consuming. Let's just call it January, and anything before then is bonus!

All right then, I'm off to try and get some word counts in for today. Any good music recommendations?

Friday, November 13, 2009

Breathing through both nostrils

A short, kind of silly post today. Maggie Stiefvater (author of 'Shiver') posted about numbers.

Number of emails received, comments replied to, harp strings she strung by hand, and randomly, the number of nostrils one breathes through at any one time. The answer is one, which I knew (trivia heard from someone sometime in the past, those pieces of info which you're never quite sure where they came from). But she noted that it's connected to which side of the brain is dominant. Left brain, right nostril, right brain, left nostril. Of course, as she knew readers would, I checked to see which nostril I was breathing.

Apparently my left brain is hard at work right now. [Or at least, it was when I first checked.] So I was thinking, despite my desire to post on this blog, or edit my synopsis, or work on book 2, I had no motivation to do any of it. Perhaps because my creative brain was chillin' at the time. Then I read that and thought I'd post about that.

...Which I didn't do for a while. I still wasn't in the right frame of mind to write anything. I check again, as I finally start writing, and I'm breathing through my left nostril now (right brain woke up).

heh. Just some fun facts/coincidences. Apparently it also goes through two- to four-hour schedules, shifting from one to the other. Maybe I should check throughout the day, whenever I'm breathing through my left nostril, rush to open a Word doc. ;)

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Honest, I didn't mean to disappear so soon for so long

I thought, "My self-imposed 'blog once a day for a month' is over, I'll take a few days off. Why, the first is even a Sunday, when I'm rarely on the computer anyway.' Five days later...

I ended up hitting one of those ugly walls of uncertainty, questioning a lot of things and generally feeling kind of junk. I opened up in more detail on my personal journal, and was reminded how great some of my friends are. I received some wonderful lines from a fellow writer, and an artist friend pointed me to this YouTube video:

Ira Glass on Storytelling


(Sorry, I'm trying to copy and paste the embedding link, but it doesn't want to cooperate.)

This was a great motivator.

And then I revisited Jeffrey Thomas' Portfolio, with the twisted Disney Princesses, such as a creepy Sleeping Beauty. Just the look of it just makes me want to write about a serial killer who kills in their sleep. (Not like a sleepwalker, but cursed or somehow self-induced, so people think there's no way it's Person X, they're always asleep during the murder.')


Isn't that a great painting? Super creepy. And some of the details on these are interesting (the books next to Alice, for one, but I won't say more because I like the thrill of discovery and hope you do, too). Seeing these, coupled with the encourgagement of friends, just makes me excited to write. It doesn't matter how discouraged I can get, I'll never stop writing.