Happy Veteran's Day...

Happy Veteran's Day to all!  Thank you to all the service men and women trying to keep the rest of us safe, both past and present.  I've been spending the day thinking about military families and what they have to go through.  Someone might be deemed a "single parent" while their loved one is serving overseas.  The adjustment the families have to make when their loved ones return home.

I'm actually starting to miss working on poetry, and especially getting inspiration at 21st Century Poets.  However, I just visited the site once again and it still has glitches they are trying to take care of, and one of my groups is still missing from the list because they are having problems getting in touch with the group moderator.

NaNoWriMo is going slower than I expected it to.  I haven't had many days that I haven't written anything in "Magic in their Blood," but the new scenes don't amount to the daily word count for the challenge.  I'm doing better this year than I have starting out with NaNoWriMo the past three years.  Strangely, reading Anne Rice has been helping me some in my novel.  It's weird because my novel doesn't encompass anything to do with mummies and vampires.  Although, there is a fantasy element to it that also shines through the Anne Rice  books that seems to be keeping me going in my story.

I do remember hearing recently that a reader can tell who an author's influences are by the way they write a novel.  If the author is into reading more than one genre, it shows in their work.  If the author only reads science fiction, for example, that also shows in their writing.  I would be one of those author's that is all over the board because I read sci-fi, mystery, courtroom thrillers, young adult, children's books, and fiction.  Basically, there hasn't been a section in my local library that I haven't found something interesting to read in which is probably why I feel like I haven't found a genre I want to stick with when it comes to my writing.

I've been thinking about hitting the library sometime during the week with my laptop to find a silent corner to write in.  There has been too many distractions at home.  The big one being one of my neighbors moved out last week and left the apartment next door to me in shambles.  So much so that my landlord had to hire someone to put new drywall in the apartment and my landlord and his brother have been banging away getting more stuff done, so the apartment can be rented out.

Daylight Savings Time Reminder...

I just wanted to post a friendly reminder for those that Daylight Savings Time affects to set your clocks back one hour tonight before you go to bed.  Yay!  An extra hour of sleep ahead of me.

NaNoWriMo is going better than I expected now that I'm three days into it.  The scenes that pop into my brain before I write them down are still all over the place, but I'm also starting to get glimpses of continuity that I didn't have before.  I've even been able to link a scene from my splice file into my manuscript and continue the story from there.

The way the scenes in my manuscript are going though startles me a bit.  The story seems to be progressing at a faster pace than I'm comfortable with, and I'm afraid I'll get to the major event in the novel way too soon.  I'll just have to wait and see as the month goes along.

NaNoWriMo is here...

It's that time of the year again!  No, I'm not talking about Halloween, but it's just as scary.  I'm talking about NaNoWriMo.  That time of the year when all participants stress levels soar through the roof as they attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days!  I have been taking part in this insane ritual for the past three years, and have yet to make the 50,000 word mark.

The bummer is I found out that the rules state I can't already use a novel I've done before.  I have to start from scratch with a new novel each time.  OOPS!  I've been slaving away on the same novel for the past three years of WriMo's, and that rule was never brought to my attention before now.

Anyway, after having a friend on Facebook pick a number between 1 and 10, I picked "Magic In Their Blood" to be my NaNoWriMo novel this year, and set about spending last week gathering the few research notes I already had on it.  Suffice it to say, I don't know how much sleep I'll be getting this month.  My characters are already waking me up in the middle of the night to write scenes, and it's only been officially started for almost 8 hours now.  Ugh!  Coffee pot, here I come! :)

I ended up having to create a splice file separate from my "Magic In Their Blood" manuscript because I can't seem to think of one continuous scene clearly at the moment, but only get snippets of the story here and there.  It makes me feel scatter-brained all of a sudden.  I'm thinking my splice file will be my best friend this go around because I've barely got the second page of the novel started in the manuscript, and have about the same amount of pages in my splice file with scenes that come later in the story.  I'm surprised I've been able to transition pretty easily to MITB when at times I still have "The Shepherdess Princess" on the brain.

I don't like having to put "The Shepherdess Princess" on the back-burner for now, but rules are rules!  I have been kind of stuck with my progress in TSP anyway, so this may end up being the boost I need to get out of my writing rut long enough to finish that novel some time after Dec. 1st comes around.