Holiday events, life in the Moody House

I love Thanksgiving!  It has turned into probably my favorite holiday. My wife and I shop together and prep the stuffing and turkey together.  I love cooking with her. After the bird is in the oven we have about 4 hours to relax, and call family.  It would be great if we were all together but our family is spread all over the country. 

Today we watched a Kung Fu movie together, about one of Bruce Lee's mentors. Grand Master Ip Man, starring Donnie Yen. It was really enjoyable. 

The turkey came out golden brown and perfectly moist and delicious, just like always and all the other fixins were hot, and scrumptious. The timing worked out just right.  We gorged!

NaNo Prep: Writing Rules III - Return of WriMo

NaNoWriMo is merely three days away, and in the spirit of preparation I revamped my Writing Rules again.  This time when I went back to review them I realized that they were a hodgepodge of thoughts with no form.  So I organized them and revamped them and added some new content.  As always I am open to suggestion if you see something wrong or something that needs clarified or plain just doesn't make sense.

This is kind of long and I have it posted as it's own page here.

A few years back a friend of mine asked if I could pass along some of what I’ve learned over the past couple of years about trying to write a book.  I’ve tried to distill that info here.

I am focused on novel writing, so all of these ideas may not apply to poetry writing or something other than Novels or Novellas.  Please feel free to add in some comments that will help refine this.  This is all from the perspective of a novice unpublished writer, but I have done my homework, and learned a few things along the way.  These so called “rules” are merely guidelines.  There are no hard and fast rules.

Next Big Thing Tag

NaNo Prep: The Next Big Thing.  Janice Hardy tagged Jami Gold, who tagged me.   I’m honored that she picked me and I’m going to do my best to answer:

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

Quoting Jami:

As NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month—write a 50K word novel during November) is all about writing “the next big thing,” I decided this would be a fun tagging game to play.

So have I.

What is your working title of your book?  

Clear Ether.  This is the2nd title I’ve used for it, but I think it works.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

This is my first novel length work, and I had a couple of idea kernels that I ended up mashing together, (those make the best stories don’t they?) one being about a vampire and the other circling loosely around my experiences sitting alert as a military pilot.  It made at least half a dozen major morphs before it emerged into what it is now.

NaNo Fail Whale

NaNoWriMo is never a waste of time in my humble opinion. I’m not going to hit the target this year of 50k words in 30 days, but the endeavor has its own rewards.

Last year I had a great idea and I think it will become my Master’s thesis and I had no trouble moving along. It was a simple idea but very open and I knew where it was going ultimately. I‘ve got stuff on the back burning and a backlog of ideas I want to explore but for this year I decided to try my hand at something completely outside of my comfort zone. The original idea was to try my hand at a YA tie- in to my current novel. But once I conceived of the idea it started to develop its own life. I thought it was just going to be in the same vein as my adult fiction, just from a different perspective, but as the idea started to coalesce it began to morph into more of a substantial piece, and basically even though the setting is several hundred years in the future it is not classic SF. It’s actually literary fiction, which is a completely different animal.

NaNo Doh!

I think I've gone and done it ... I've blow an O-ring or something and my motivation has been leaking out in vast quantities.  My wife said to blame it on biorhythms ... and that may be part of it, but in the last week I've barely been on any social media and have written almost nothing.   I've basically been vegging.  I haven't felt compelled to do anything creative, not even play a video game.   I have several projects going at the same time, including NaNoWriMo, and I think initially it may have been a reaction to overloading myself.

NaNoWriMo Take 2

I can see that NaNoWriMo is going to be interrupting my planned schedule for posting this blog.  I had to fly on Thursday evening, so I tried to sneak in some writing at work, but it didn't leave me any blog time.  Posting the blog at work has been a near disaster so far.  The LAN we use is hermetically sealed and I feel lucky I can even get to blogspot at all.  I've also been fighting a cold and an abdominal muscle injury that is hampering my workouts considerably, but that really doesn' effect the blog any, just my demeanor.  But all that aside, trying to keep pace with my NaNoWriMo story is the real culprit.  I could have blogged last night, but I'm doing the exact opposite of what I had planned, which is fall dreadful behind, so I hemorraged words onto the NaNo WIP.

Belated Blog Awards and NaNoWriMo!

I’ve been strangely busy in the evenings the last couple of weeks; either that or I’ve been playing too much on World of Warcraft of my new beta test group Star Wars the Old Republic!  Can’t really talk about that but suffice to say it’s pretty damned awesome. 

I’ve been meaning to put up my new blog award for several weeks, and just got another one, so I’m putting them both up together.

Many thanks to Megan Lollman!  Her blog is Megan Rae Lollman: Words from an aspiring author from the Midwest.  She awarded me the Liebster Blog Award, which is aimed to showcase bloggers with less than 200 followers.  The rules:

Habit not so much formed

Well, its now the 4th of December and I haven't been writing for the last 4 days.  I'm disappointed, but it's been a busy week this week.  Hoping to get some writing in tomorrow on Vim Dicare.


I've been getting into twitter a lot more since NaNoWriMo started.  I am following enough interesting people that its worth it to stop in and see what's going on.  Just updated my background with some original artwork that I made with Photoshop.  I love me some Photoshop.

NaNoWriMo 2010 is in the can

     It's over at midnight tonight, but I hit the 50k mark last night around 11:30 pm.  Big win for me!  My first attempt and it was not horribly hard, although there were times I wasn't sure I would make it.  The entire trick is to be consistant.  I have no idea how people write 15 to 20 thousand words in one day.  My best day was about 3500.  I had several days over 3k and several under 1k. But I only skipped 4 days I think in the entire month.


     I want to congratulate everyone that gave it a shot!  At least you wrote something.  Starting is more than half the battle with writing, IMHO.

NaNoWriMo coming to a close

Only 4 days left on NaNoWriMo.  It's been an interesting experience.  I've learned that I am only good for a couple of thousand words a day no matter how much time I set aside.  I don't have a good answer as to why, except that maybe I'm easily distracted.  I will ahve a different plan for next year.  This year I have been almost perpetually behind the curve.  I started out just over the line for the first week, then fell back and have been trying to catch up ever since. 


I have less than 8,ooo words to go, so I should be able to do it and I'm not close to finishing the story.  That's ok, I just wanted to get a leg up on the story, so I would have something to work on after I finish Vim Dicare and the editing thereof.


I think I will try again next year, I don't think I've been too horrible to my family during this time.  Next year the plan will be to get as far out in front early on as I possibly can.  I am also hoping that doing this for 30 days will create a new habit of writing, that will propel me to finishing the first novel. 


Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Halfway through NaNoWriMo

     Well today marks the halfway point and I am slightly behind, at 22, 000 words, but I getting confident now that I will make it, especially with the four days off around Thanksgiving.  It's the slowest moving novel I've written so far, but the rewrite will make it all better.


     Week two lived up to the hype, I fell behind and thought about quitting, but perservered. 


     Week three is supposed to be magical, I can't wait for the magic to happen.


     I'm thinking about putting some of it up here, but I need to actually have some good stuff, so far not much good stuff I think.

NaNoWriMo

     I made it past week one without any trouble and week two is living up to its reputation as being the toughest week of the month.  I've fallen behind a bit due to work, but I have a long weekend and hope to catch up and get a little bit ahead.  It's been fun and I've been happy to see that I can put out some content fairly quickly if I push myself.  I have a little over 14,000 words so far on day 11.


     It is frustrating to see some people "win" on day 3.  I'm not sure what the msot I can do in one day is, but I think the most I've done so far is about 2500 words in one day.  I'm hoping to pass that sometime this month.