Well, some or many of you may know that I participate in the Gainesville Fiction Writers group. Sadly many of our members have moved away from the Gainesville area, and our group has grown small (or rather, has refused to grow beyond the steady number of 4 members). I am happy to say that this morning at our meeting we finally came up with an action plan. We are going to hold an "open house" type event here in Gainesville to see if we can drum up more members from the region interested in participating in the group.

Also, we are going to move a bit more online with our work. We have created a Yahoo group for the group, and use it to announce meetings as well as post stories and chapters of books for critique, and discuss what our next anthology will be. Since we have such wonderful tools available to us, we have decided to turn our attention a bit more to the virtual world. We are reaching out to our former members who have since moved away, and to other interested writers, and try to provide a place where they can participate in a writers group, receive feedback for their work, and provide a place for them to talk about their writing woes. To that end, I have posted a link to those who are interested in joining our writing group. Please feel free to sign up directly, or you can leave any questions for me here, and I'll be happy to answer them.



Click to join gvwriters

Simon and Millie
~2 hours last week
1/20   1.5 hours
1/27   45 minutes
2/3      1 hour 10 minutes
2/3      30 minutes
2/7       40 minutes
2/14    1 hour 10 minutes
2/21    40 minutes
2/23    1 hour

-- 9 hours 25 min for first draft (minus epilogue) 1st edit

Oversight
time?
    - to completion for draft

Final Exam
Original version: 1 hour
re-write version:
    2/2    4.5 hours

Divine Madness
2/24    1 hour 15 minutes

Moleskin Project story
~15 min re-write

This year I have decided to seriously undertake editing as part of the writing process. I have several editing goals this year. These include:

Edit a Nano novel (most likely Divine Madness)
Edit my two Mr. Smith stories for the GFW anthology
Edit the Simon and Millie story with Alison
Participate in NaNo EdMo in March, logging in 50 hours of editing in March
Read books on writing and editing interspersed with my "for fun" reading

I have edited and resubmitted one of Mr. Smith stories, and made a fair start on the second.

Tonight I worked an hour and a half on some formatting and spelling (and correctly spelled but wrong word) errors in the Millie and Simon story.

I think I might start a log for hours towards editing, maybe set a goal for each week (which would be adjusted during March, of course).

But it's only the second week of January, and I feel I've already got a good start.

And thanks to Allie for switching one of our regular writing days to an editing day. It'll help keep me on track, I know.

Now that November is over I’m falling back into the routine of sitting down to write 3 times a week with my writing buddy in Arizona. We hop online into a chat, and set a time limit to how long we’re going to write based on how we feel.

 It took me a few sessions to get back into the swing of things, and the first two days I journaled, as well as turning out a single 500 word story. The last two sessions, however, I have gotten back to my current work-in-progress, Fallen. Aside from managing to accidently delete what I had written on Sunday, and have to re-type it (luckily I had managed to print it before deleting the file), it has been going well (Is it too early to say that?)

 To the ends of trying to make my characters consistent, I have been re-reading what I had written before November. I had managed to jump back in okay, on a quite emotional scene for me to write, actually. Last night was a little harder, but I found that my characters are at a point where they have their lives, and I just need to pick a time frame and observe.

 Other works-in-progress that I have include the Simon and Millie letter project. We are 4 letters from the end (including the epilogue) and one of those is already written. I am waiting for the next Millie letter so I can write the last Simon letter of the main story. Part of that is waiting for the author I am collaborating with to also recover from National Novel Writing Month, and find her “Millie-voice” again.

I am also long over due in writing a letter for one of my friend’s D&D characters from one of mine. These are characters that are pretty much retired unless we meet with members from our old gaming group for epic level games; but there was a storyline going on between her and my character, a problem which to resolve, and her character sent her apology. It’s up to my character to reply (long over due, like 3 years in real time) and finally resolve the situation.

 Aside from that I have decided that I am going to try to read books about writing, or technique, or other things from my personally extensive writing library. I say extensive, but in reality takes only a shelf and a half of the 6 book-cases we have filled. But I have only read about 3 of them, and referenced a few others. My goal is to read what others have to say on writing, and summarize the parts that I think are valuable in my journal – ready reference, if you will. But I will read other books, fiction, fantasy and so on, in between the writing books. I don’t want reading them to seem like a chore, but I figure I have the resources, so I might as well see what these authors about writing have to say.

 Oh, and I think I’m going to try to sign up for NaNo EdMo, whenever it may be, try to get some editing in on a previous NaNo WriMo novel. I just have to pick which one. So that is a brief “here’s where I’m at” about writing.

Well, here it is. The end. A different end than I had (sort of) envisioned. I didn't have a clear idea on how it would end, actually, but I feel like once again my characters stopped being characters - stopped being themeselves, near the end.  But then maybe that's just how I feel after 30 days of writing mayham.






4352 words today
Grand total:  78,192 words

I had to stop writing in the middle of a scene, so I'm omitting that scene from this post, and will start the next post with it.





4529 words today
73,840 words total

I got a load of suggetions tonight - makes up for some of the quieter sessions, I'd say. And makes for one insane dream :-)






2903 words today
69,3111 words total

...I feel like a bum. I was getting suggestions (and questions) tonight as I was writing, but I failed to notice my comments box had stopped refreshing. So it looked like I was ignoring the person who had come and was graciously making suggestions :-(  I'll be adding it to my scene tomorrow.
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2156 words tonight
66,408 words total

Ah, finally, some explainations!





2030 words today
64252 words total

I've gotten stuck - hence the abrupt stop at the end of this writing session. I think it might be time for another time leap?





1274 words today
60550 word total

And here is the trauma I promised one of my visitors.





2567 word today
59,276 words total

Only one scene b/c it's a holiday. Happy Thanksgiving!




1241 words today
56,709 words total

I wrote less time tonight b/c I need to clean for tomorrow. Plus, don't miss it, Kyle's first ( and only?) scene from his perspective.



1355 words today
55,468 words total

More words, more words!! Maybe shooting for 100k? Or maybe just 75 K.




2499 words today
54113 words total

Well I passed the 50,000 word mark tonight. But the story is far from over. I'll be writing the rest of the month, and plan to drag out the story for that long ;-)




1955 words tonight
51,614 words total

Just over 300 word shy of 50k. Whee!





2018 words today
49,659 words total

Whoo hoo- I'm at 47K, and my story is finally starting to get interesting! (read, finally getting to the plot.)





3017 words today
47641 words total

argh - I can't update my crushedmuffin site. Frustration - but more words (yay). Writing moved to 9 pm tomorrow so I can attend a reading by a past local wrimo.






2371 words tonight
44624 words total

Finally realized I needed to jump foward in time a few weeks so it didn't get excrucatinlgy slow and boring. Hope you enjoy.


( Read more... )


2459 words today
42253 words total - I may shoot for 100k this year?

1621 words today
39,794 words total