inspiration

50K and the light at the end of the tunnel

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I’m writing like a fiend. Despite all odds, I have managed to write every single day this month. Even when I ended up in the ER, through the death of a pet and the adoption of a new one, and the last minute frantic planning of WordCamp Austin, I have found time to put words down on virtual paper, and to stay at or above “par” almost every day. For proof, here’s today’s stats: The diagonal line represented “par”, or the total number of words I needed to log in order to stay on track to reach 50K by April 30. Each bar is the total wordcount to date, and whether I was above or below par by that day. As you can see, I’ve cut it close. When I did NaNoWriMo last November, even with traveling out of the country for a week I made much better progress: I attribute the differences to a few things. Of course it … Read more…

Unexpected inspiration

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You have to grab good ideas when they find you, or they’ll pass you by and someone else will get them. Someone, I think a musician, said something along these lines, and the idea stuck with me. You never know when you’ll be struck with inspiration, and you need to be able to capture it or it will fly away. For several months, since December or January, I’ve been struggling with a major plot point in the novel I began for NaNoWriMo. As I edited the novel, the hole became more and more glaring, and no matter how I tried to fix it, nothing felt right. Night after night I tried to come up with a solution, writing lots of bits I later cut, and redoing the previous chapters to try to make something work. All these attempts, however, were failures. Nothing clicked. It got so discouraging that I had a hard time staying motivated to finish the project, and caught … Read more…