MayNoWriMo Day 28

I hit 50,000 words today!

That was pretty much the only writing bright spot of the day. I have hit a slump, y'all. Every minute of writing was painful and everything I wrote sucked.

Just keepin' it real. Writing this novel has been mostly rainbows and sunshine and sexytimes, but today it was a slog.

MayNoWriMo Day 26

I had another 2k+ day and am up to 47,450 words. Still a lot of smut going on over here.

I may need another plot-planning day soon, since I'm rapidly approaching the end of the results of my last plot-planning day. I just spent 15 minutes making a list of everything I can think of that needs to happen between now and the end, and then cutting and pasting them together in scene-groups and shuffling the scenes into rough order. It is far, FAR from done, but I do know what the next chapter after the one I'm writing now is going to be about, which is more than I knew half an hour ago.

MayNoWriMo Day 24

One week left to the month! I wrote the NaNo bare minimum of ~1,700 today, and am up to 43,500. I just wrote a condom-buying scene that I love because I know what's coming later. *evil cackle*

MayNoWriMo Day 23

I wrote 3,000 words today, and am at 41,750 words for the month.

Today I everything I wrote was smut.

MayNoWriMo Day 22

38,750 words, and I'm on the cusp of the big midpoint moment. Sexytimes ahoy! ;)

MayNoWriMo Day 20

I'm at 34,400 words! I just finished a scene I loved loved loved writing. My couple aren't a couple yet (this is a slower burn Romance with the hook-up not occurring until the midpoint), and this is the first super-romantic scene I've written for them. They are standing in an empty, unheated farmhouse where Maize lived as a child, and Colin tells her about a time they met as kids that she's forgotten about. It was so much fun to write. *happy sigh*

MayNoWriMo Day 18

Yesterday was a thinking day. I wasn't happy with how I'd ended a chapter the day before, so I backed up and had a think about it. I knew the next 7-10K worth of stuff I wanted to have happen, but the puzzle pieces weren't coming together into a picture I was happy with.

I think I got it shuffled in the right order, and as of tonight I'm at 31,000 words. It's a clear path 'til the midpoint now. After that I may have to take another day to plot and think.

Hook

Here's the 150-word hook I wrote for Master of the Off-Chance. It's not as long as a query blurb, and it was hard to to convey a sense of character, setting, and conflict in that amount of space. And I really do not dig the last line, but I was sick of fiddling with it, so it's standing for now.


Maize Gersham is a second-generation hippie who’s been drifting though life like a bit of dandelion fluff on the wind, searching for the perfect place to put down roots. Nowhere could be more perfect than Eden House, the now-disbanded commune where she grew up, in the rural Vermont town of Hartfield. Maize blows back into Hartfield like a cloud of patchouli incense, planning to recreate the groovy utopia of her childhood— minus the messy love affairs that tore the commune apart. 

When Maize meets local boy Colin Grzeskiewicz, she doesn’t think much of him— just another cute redneck guy hoping for some free love. But there’s way more to Colin than a baseball cap, a pickup truck, and a great smile. And he’s determined to be her new best friend. 

Now Maize has to decide what “perfect” really means when you’re talking about home and love.

MayNoWriMo, Mid-Month Check In

I'm above 29,000 now! Far short of my grand dreams of being at 40,000 by now, but hey-- it's 29,000 more than I would have gotten in the past two weeks if I hadn't tried this insane challenge.

I feel like I'm floundering around a little, plot-wise. I'm really curious to re-read this whole thing once I'm done and see how well it holds up. I've been devouring tons of contemporary Romance novels  and novellas (only bothering with those rated A- or higher on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) on my laptop Kindle so I have some benchmark to measure against.

Oh, and I have a title (for now): Master of the Off-Chance.

I'm submitting a 150-word hook and the first 750 words to the Beta Project on Absolute Write, so if I'm feeling brave I'll post the hook here so you all can get a better picture of just how Romance-y this thing really is.

MayNoWriMo Day 13

I hit 25,000 words today, and am nearly 1/3 through the book.

There's no way I'm going to finish the draft by the end of the month... but now I know I can write a clean first draft at NaNo pace.

MayNoWriMo Day 10

I'm up to 20,211 words and have passed over from Act I to Act II. This is awesome, but still a little under what I was hoping for. It's really tricky striking this balance between writing as fast as I can but not just vomiting out words to make a word count. I do think that what I have so far is a pretty solid first draft. We'll see how the first half of Act II unfolds.

MayNoWriMo, Days 6 and 7

I wrote 1.5K yesterday, but felt blah about a big chunk of it and ended the day feeling like I was on the wrong track, and dreading having to work on it today. This is NOT what I want, word count goal or no, so I did some thinking and note-taking, and spent most of my writing time today rewriting the scene I wrote yesterday. So I've only made 100 words of progress, but I feel loads better about the book.

My goal is break 15K on the book this evening, then do some planning for the next few scenes.

MayNoWriMo, Days 4 and 5

I couldn't post last night because The Husband was doing some overdue maintenance work on my laptop.

Thurs. I wrote 2K words and today I wrote 3K. The book is just a hair over 13K at this point. I think I'm going to have to slow down for a few days to work out some plot points, but I'm still aiming to finish the draft this month-- or at the very least, break my old NaNo record, which is 62,000 words of garbage. If I can write more than that, and have it be a clean first draft, I'll be happy.

Just not as happy as I'll be if I finish the draft!

MayNoWriMo Day 3

2,381 words today. I was determined to hit 8,000 words/~10% of the story today, and I got there, but it was a struggle toward the end. Today's writing was all about the backstory wound. Tomorrow should be more fun and Romance-y.

I forgot to mention I did a Tarot reading for my female MC yesterday. I've owned the same Tarot deck for 32 years (now THAT'S scary-- how did I get this old??) and never done a reading for a character before. But I'm writing about second-generation hippies, and the character gets her cards read, so what the hey. I'd only planned to choose one card from the reading that seemed most apropos to the plot and write about it, but the whole reading was incredibly apropos, so I wound up including all of it.

And I may have found a title. Not ready to post it yet, since I'm still looking for other options (for probably dumb reasons I am pulling the title from an existing body of song lyrics), but for now I'll be calling this novel ST instead of M&C.

MayNoWriMo Day 2

Word count for the day: 3,496!

I have two chapters completed!

I am having fun. So, sooooo much fun.

MayNoWriMo, Day 1

That's basically what I'm doing, right? A NaNo?

2,157 words today. Finished scene 1. Kept faithful stats on where and when and what and how much, and need a few more days' worth of data before I can draw any meaningful conclusions.

Going Rogue

So, I'm setting FAaLA aside for a bit and writing a contemporary Romance this month. M'kay bye!

...

What, you want more explanation that that?

Okay. Here's the sequence of events that led to this impulsive and probably ill-conceived decision:

1) After a few days of flying high on enthusiasm for FAaLA, I crashed into meh-ness. I have the set-up all clear in my mind but can't seem to get a handle on the overall plot arc. Maybe it just needs to marinate a little longer? I dunno. Also, I've been reading a TON of Sci-Fi lately to psych myself up for returning to the genre, but maybe I overdid it.

2) I've also been watching a ton of the Avatar: The Last Airbender TV show with The Son (holy crap, it's SO MUCH better than it needs to be), and following the main "bad guy's" arc from villain to antagonist to protagonist/ally has made me re-think Leopold's arc in Mender. I'm still waiting on some agent replies-- including on a partial request-- but if I don't get an offer of representation from this first batch of queries I may go in and do another 1-2 weeks of edits on Mender to sharpen that aspect of the story. I don't want to interrupt the forward momentum of another book to do that.

3) For years, I've been building a modern-day New England town in my mind and wishing I had a story to put there. For a while, I thought it would make a great TV show. Then I came up with a low fantasy premise, but it felt like I was shoe-horning the fantasy elements in there to make it fit with the rest of my "brand". And then I read the Raven Cycle and realized that my idea was a pale shadow of that series. So I have this whole town-- maps drawn, history thought through, minor characters put in place-- and nothing to do with it.

4) Ever since I read Rachel Aaron/Bach's book 2,000 to 10,000, I've been itching to push myself and see just how fast I can write a decent first draft. What holds me back is the fear of fucking it up and writing something that winds up needing tons of revision drafts. Therefore, I think the best way to experiment with this is on a project that meets the following criteria: 1) shorter than my usual novels, with a simpler plot, and 2) something I'm excited to write, yet won't be devastated to just trunk if the first draft turns out to be a hilarious mess.

5) Thursday night I had a dream, and when I woke up Friday morning I had one of those writing moments when several ideas that have been simmering in your story-pot come together on a plate, complete with sprig of parsley for garnish. The town + the story and MC from the upmarket contemporary novel I tried to write in grad school + a romantic hero I love as a character but who would never fit into a Fantasy or Sci-Fi world =  70-80K contemporary Romance, aiming more for Rainbow Rowell territory than Harlequin.

I gave myself three days to plan it-- I know-- and no more than 31 to write the first draft, starting today. I'm going to be keeping track of writing hours and word counts, and probably making a series of very boring posts reporting them all. This month is as much about data-gathering as it is about writing a book.

So that's me this month! I'm a loose cannon, baby!

(Oh, and this book has no title yet. I'm calling it M&C now, for the heroine and hero's first names.)