NaNoWriMo... AGAIN!

So, it's November.

You know what that means, right?

NaNoWriMo! 
(aka National Novel Writing Month)

Yup, I'm writing another novel. I don't know when I'll find the time to squeeze it in around work and college and work and more college... Yeah.

But I do have some secret weapons:

-M&Ms
-Write or Die
-Fingerless gloves
-Friends who are also writing!
-My Snowflake document 
-A NaNo playlist full of soundtrack music that fits my story
-A Pinterest pinboard full of images that make me excited to write
-My sketchbook

My novel this year is fantasy with strong elements of steampunk. It's set in Victorian London. I've been doing a lot of research in the last year or so getting ready for this, and I STILL don't feel qualified to write about a real time and place. So I'm just going to toss all my nonfiction books about Victorian London out the window and write the dang story first.

Title: Twyndyllyng

The story revolves around a young inventor named Alexander "Phoenix" Gaffney, the son of two ornithologists. He's working on a revolutionary invention that could change history forever if successful - the world's first flying machine. His only problem: ever since boyhood he has been cursed with a degenerative disease that will kill him if a cure is not found.

His mother, who gave him his mythical nickname when he was first diagnosed, raised him on fanciful stories of a powerful being called the Twyndyllyng, the magical link between humans and birds. If anyone could help him, the Twyndyllyng could. However, the Twyndyllyng has not been seen for over a century, and for Phoenix, time is running out. And if by some miracle, he can find the Twyndyllyng, he may find that she's not at all what he expected.


That's it, folks! What are YOU doing this November?

Another Round of Novel Writing

Yes.
It's that time of year again. November is, after all, National Novel Writing Month.

This will be my 7th year participating in NaNoWriMo, and hopefully the 7th time I "win," ending the month with another 50,000-word novel. I'm preparing to block myself from Facebook, lock myself in my dorm room, attempt to avoid any and all distractions, and write like there's no tomorrow.

Call me crazy, but this is my favorite activity of the year. This year I'm doing something totally new: I'm trying the seat-of-the-pants approach. No outline, no extensive worldbuilding, no research. Whee!

So what am I writing? Having been thoroughly inspired by books such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Airborn, and Leviathan, I'm going all-out Steampunk!

Y'know, like this:

Or like this:

Even though I don't have an outline, I do have a general idea of where I'll be heading with the plot. Here's a short teaser for Silver Sky:

"In an imaginary world where all compasses point to the Queen's palace, an awkward, bookish young woman named Sylvianna is shocked to find that her rich family is actually made up of feuding sky pirates. She's kidnapped by the worst of them all, a man named Sean Fletcher... her long-lost father.



As she reels with this discovery, she struggles against her family history, social expectations, and her own secret desires for adventure. But eventually, she realizes that she must become what she most hates -a pirate- to stop the empire from destroying itself."

Want to join the writing fun? Head on over to the NaNoWriMo website and get yourself signed up!

Sorry! I'm writing a novel at the moment! Please leave a message and I'll get back to you in December.

It's National Novel Writing Month! (aka NaNoWriMo)

So, you probably won't see much of me for awhile. I do this every year (hopefully, this will be my sixth "win"), and I absolutely love it. If you've ever considered writing a novel, you might want to check this out.

I'm writing a YA Christian fantasy novel again. The title is Greenheart, and it's the prequel to last year's novel, Bluewillow. I'm writing by hand, so I haven't had any time to type up any excerpts yet, but I'll be sure to do that... in December. :)

Here's a (rather lengthy) one-sentence summary:
A curious orphan who talks to trees learns that he is one of the Flickerfew, and struggles to master his strange talents to save his world from genetically engineered wild beasts and the evil that controls them.

At the librarians' request, I made a display about NaNoWriMo at my local library, which you can see in this picture (go ahead, you can click it if you want to):

And of course I couldn't resist making a web banner for my novel:

That's all for now, folks! See you in December!

The Thing About Plot Bunnies

What is a plot bunny?

plot bun•ny
noun
A seemingly exciting plot twist idea for your work-in-progress that takes the form of an adorable, infuriating rabbit who leads you down a winding trail that either goes on forever, and never ends anywhere; or takes you through a dark and scary forest; and sometimes ends up in a happy meadow; but most often it all ends up with you, the writer, falling into a rabbit-hole and having lots of wacky adventures in an insane world with oddly familiar people who vaguely resemble your characters.

How's that for a run-on sentence? Maybe I can get this definition into the dictionary.  :)

THE END! And some excerpts!

I'm DONE! Yesterday, I finally finished my NaNoWriMo novel, Bluewillow! I'm so relieved and glad to be done writing for awhile. The final word-count is 76,114, which is only a thousand words over what I estimated it would be. That's almost 200 hand-written pages!

Here's a brief synopsis of the plot:

Bluewillow

The Flicker Chronicles book 2
A girl with blue hair wakes up under a willow tree and can only remember other people's memories. She sets out to find a mysterious inter-dimensional portal that could somehow be the key to her past, but she gets caught up in a struggle between colorful worlds. Will she turn to the true King before it's too late?

Here's the banner I made for the book: 

And here are a couple of short poems from my novel. I wasn't expecting to write any poetry, but these just appeared on the page without me really thinking about it. :) And then I put them to music, and turned them both into songs.

"In the wings of the morning, in the depths of the earth

Ring songs of great value and words of great worth

The birds of the air and the fish will cry out

When the people are silent, even stones will shout."

And then a silly one:

"My honey went away, away, away,

In search of another day, away, away.

My dear sweet girlie

Went all a-twirly

And fell into a portal swirly

And made my head turn gray, away, away."

Later, when I type out my book and start editing (it needs a LOT of editing), I'll post some longer excerpts. But for now, I need to turn my attention to other things, namely Christmas. I enjoy making gifts for my family, but that will require a lot of time and energy, so I'm putting my finished draft aside for awhile. 

Swine Flu and Novel Writing

Yeah... I'm sorry I haven't been posting at all during November. I wanted to keep you guys updated with my word-count goals and excerpts from my novel, but less than a week into the month, I got really sick. I never went to the doctor to get tested, but I had all the symptoms of the H1N1 swine flu. I had a fever for nine days, and felt poorly for over two weeks.

Of course, that didn't help with the novel writing. I've never been sick during National Novel Writing Month before, so it was a frustrating time for me. I wanted to make it to at least 75,000 words, and hopefully finish the whole story, but with several days in there where I didn't write ANYTHING, I was really behind. My parents kept telling me to give myself a break, but it was hard when I've been planning this book for months, and looking forward to NaNoWriMo all year.

It was also hard to accept that I would be writing alone this year. In all the other years of NaNo, my brother was writing with me, and then my dad tried it and my younger sister did it for a couple of years. But this year, the others weren't able to write novels for one reason or another, so I was alone. (And since I was sick, I couldn't go to any write-ins with local Wrimos.)

I did make it to 50,000, though, and then for the last three days of November, I wrote over 5,000 words a day!  Yay! My final count is 70,213 handwritten words. So even though it felt like a terrible month, it was not totally unsuccessful.

And yet, my book is not yet completed. *sigh* Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to write I go... And when I finish, I'll come back and post a few excerpts for y'all to pick on and admire. :)

Are You Ready?

50,000 words. 30 days. It's coming... Will you be ready?

Join the fun! Write a novel! www.nanowrimo.org

NaNoEdMo: March 1-31

I have finally decided to try my hand at editing. I recently signed up for National Novel Editing Month, a program inspired by NaNoWriMo, but with the goal of completing 50 hours of serious editing during the month of March. It's a big goal, and something I've never tried before. I did some editing on my novel The Shadow of Greed before I self-published it, but it was mostly to correct spelling errors and little things like that. I didn't really get my hands dirty.

But now I have a hefty rough draft waiting around--the sequel, The Shadow of Rebellion, and I know that this book will require a lot more attention... yeah. It's almost frightening to read the thing. 

That's why I put "Edit my novel" on my Big, Fun, Scary Adventures list for 2009. I know it's important to learn how to self-edit, so right now I'm reading a very helpful book titled Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print, by Renni Browne and Dave King. I plan to use the checklists at the end of each chapter as I'm going through my draft in March.

This is all very new to me, but I'm eager to learn as much as I can through this project. Self-editing is one of the "courses" that I need to take in order to become a successful, published author, and I'm ready to start learning.

On to Bigger Things...

On November 30th, at 11:58 pm, I wrote THE END. I finished the first draft of my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel with a hefty 103,396 words. Whew! It turned out to be the longest thing I've ever written in my life! So far, that is. :)

I'm going to take a break from my novel for awhile. I need to let my brain rest. I might pick it up again in January to begin editing and rewriting, because it still needs a lot of work before I let anybody read it, even my family.  I skipped whole sections when I was writing it, because I knew that they needed time and effort that I was unable to provide during NaNoWriMo. I'm happy with the way my novel turned out, despite the many gaping holes and mistakes in it. I love writing.

So, now, in December, I'm going to try to get back to a few of the things that I've neglected lately, such as my altered book, schoolwork, and my blog, of course. I have a few posts waiting in the wings, and I've still got the feeling that I need to be writing, even though my novel is finished. I feel like I need to go on to bigger things, now that I have time to spare. I'll be thinking about what's next on my agenda...

Before I go, here's a picture of my novel cover, featuring my main character, Kimble Haansvoy. 

NaNoWriMo~ WINNER!

I don't have a lot of time for blogging these days, and just to prove it, here's my winner's icon for making it to 50,000 words in the National Novel Writing Month challenge (aka NaNoWriMo).

So, I'm working on my novel a lot, and right now I'm at about 96,000 words, and there's still two days left. I'm hoping to be at 100,000 words by the 30th of November, and have my first draft finished, too. It's a lot of work, but so much fun! I'm writing The Shadow of Rebellion, the sequel to my novel from November 2006, The Shadow of Greed. It's going to end up being a trilogy, I think.

I'm excited about this novel, even though it will be needing a LOT of editing. A lot. This is a really rough first draft for me, probably because I tried to squeeze in 100,000 words in one month instead of the usual 50,000.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I haven't forgotten about my blog-- I'm just writing like crazy right now and don't have much time. I'll be back in December, hopefully.