April Is For Winning!

Behold! My first Camp NaNoWriMo win!

I'm pretty proud of myself this month. Not only because I set myself a reasonable word count goal and met it, but because I took the opportunity to truly commit myself to writing. I have done little else for the past three weeks other than writing. (And cooking and cleaning - sort of.)

I also finished reading TEN books. Granted, two of them were comic strip collections, but still. It was a lot of reading.

Grave of the Goddess is officially over 100,000 words now. I am so very close to finishing it. My poor, bedraggled main characters have reached their final destination at last. Unfortunately, they're both about to experience a load of heartbreak, but that's how it goes. I am hoping with everything I know how to hope with that I will be finished with this draft in another 10k words. And then I can hand it over to my beta readers and relax with writing Holyoak Five while they tear Grave to pieces for me.

That was my month. Not much else happened to me. I've been pretty isolated what with not using Tumblr or Facebook. (That's right! I stayed true to my drastic goals and haven't used those at all.) But it's a productive kind of isolation. And it's such a relief to have the end of this draft in sight that I don't mind not having achieved much of anything else this month...


For the curious, here are the books I read this month broken into genres.

Young Adult (mostly fantasy):
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
Rebel Angels by Libba Bray
The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray
The Bitter Kingdom by Rae Carson

Middle Grade :
The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Non-fiction:
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Horror:
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Girl Who Love Tom Gordon by Stephen King

Comics:
The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
The Best of Foxtrot by Bill Amend



Bring on May! I'm ready for it.

April Write Motivation Goals

Hey, look at that. It's April 14th and I've haven't posted a thing about my goals for this month. Whoops!

My goals:

1. Do Camp NaNoWriMo with a word count goal of at least 27k for the month.
2. Finish rough draft of my WIP novel.
3. Keep posting weekly episodes of Holyoak Five.
4. Replace playing video games with reading books.

So the general plan for this month is to skyrocket into writing bliss based on all the good habits I started (fairly successfully) last month.

Progress so far:

Camp NaNoWriMo: Started out slow. Going much better after Saturday's Writeathon where I wrote 3k words. I'm currently sitting at just under 9k words for the month... Which is fine, it's all right, I can't complain. (Who am I going to complain to anyway? My boyfriend knows the drill by know. He just rolls his eyes and says, "Write, bitch!" Oh, I love him.) But I felt like the 27k goal was a minimum and am a teensy bit mad at myself for not being ahead of the curve.

Finish rough draft of Grave of the Goddess: My frustration with this as been at astronomical levels. I keep plugging away at it, but there's still so much left. In that vein, I have made some pretty drastic amendments to my daily schedule. I've got a list of about six "approved" activities I can participate in, and writing is number one. This has been going on since last Wednesday, and so far I've finished reading four books and written thousands of words. So... you know... I think it's going well!

Keep posting weekly episode of Holyoak Five: Falling behind. I'm about to go make an author's note post explaining that episodes might have to be biweekly now until I'm done with Grave. (I'm still writing it every day, but my concentration has definitely shifted to Grave.)

Replace video games with books: WOO! Totally, wildly successful. I'm catching up on my GoodReads challenge with a vengeance. Of course, it helps that I've cut out all tv/Netflix binging as well. (Other than Red Sox games, Game of Thrones, and the occasional Nature documentary in bed with the boy.)

So that's me so far this month. I have high hopes for finishing Grave soon at which point it goes out to beta reading, I start rewriting, and a lot of tears fall into every meal I consume for the next few months. You know how it goes.

#WriterLife TAG by @KelsNotChels

My new favorite YouTuber @KelsNotChels posted a video last week starting a #WriterLife tag. Well, I am not a YouTuber (a lot of effort and ego that I do not possess) but I loved all of the questions! As a blogger, I figured why not just answer them here?

1. Write Fuel: What do you eat/drink while writing?

- Relatively recently I started drinking coffee in the morning and found that caffeine (like alcohol) is a double-edged sword for my writing. The right amount and I can produce words like Michael Crichton. Too much and I am so useless I might as well be a monkey with a typewriter. Usually I just drink a lot of tea when I'm writing. Black tea, white tea, herbal tea, I have it all. And I find snacking next to impossible - which might be a good thing.

2. Write Sounds: What do you listen to while writing?

- If I want to get in the Zone I turn on Coffitivity and an 8tracks playlist or a Pandora station specifically crafted for writing ambiance. And then I put my super awesome Bose headphones on and it's like my muse is whispering in my ears.

3. Write Vice: What's your most debilitating distraction?

- Tumblr, no contest. Sometimes I go there to put up a short gif reaction post about my WIP and TWO HOURS LATER emerge with a queue that's three days long.

4. Write Horror: What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you while writing?

- Suddenly realizing that the pain in my left wrist has caught fire and I've ignited my tendinitis again.

5. Write Joy: What's the best thing that's ever happened while writing or how do you celebrate small victories?

- Best thing is something I can't actually talk about because of the Spoilers. I celebrate small victories by waltzing around the kitchen with my cat. No lie. My boy can confirm.

6. Write Crew: Who do you communicate with or not communicate with while writing?

- I put the headphones on so the boy doesn't distract me. But sometimes I talk to my TTT buddies or the fine folk on Twitter for inspiration and/or working out plot problems.

7. Write Secret: What's your writing secret to success or hidden flaw?

- Secret to success: trust the process and don't stop just because it gets hard. (That's not really a secret, but it is a truth that's difficult to accept sometimes.) Oh wait! My real writing secret is that when you don't know what to write, write a dream. Or a flashback. Even if you don't end up keeping it, it always seems easier to churn these out than the narrative storyline. And it can produce useful ideas!

8. Write-spiration: What always makes you productive?

- Music and tea! I am also highly inspired after reading a good book or watching a good movie. And reading about other writers.

9. Write Peeve: What's one thing writers do (or you do) that's annoying?

- Overly descriptive passages that don't serve the story. My biggest pet peeve about myself is my inability to finish something before moving on to the next project. But I'm working on it!

10. Write Words- Share one sentence from a project. Past or present.

 - From Grave of the Goddess:

He felt like an hourglass running out of sand.

(And here's the video. I love writers talking about writing!)