Camp NaNoWriMo day -6: hoping my countdown is right

Counting down! Are you ready to write?

Best spam comment ever:

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Seriously, WTH? I mean, I have to save the text of this comment for posterity just because it's clear evidence that the internet is indeed trying to communicate with us. Although something about verso cobwebs is bothering me. Does that mean it's true that nobody reads the publishing/printing information at the start of the book?

Camp NaNoWriMo day -7: Inside my character's head

Camp NaNo 2012. Scared... but doing it anyway.

So, I have this story. It used to be a trilogy, but then I somehow found the plot for a fourth book that answers a lot of questions about MMC Toby. You see, I dumped him into the first story already broken and not quite interested enough in life to want to seek revenge for the events that had changed his life. I went on from there and never really looked at the events that had broken him.

Word-vomit, pillow-fights and camping

Right, I've given myself a choice: either word-vomit myself a blog post NOW or I have to post the somewhat embarrassing pillow-fight with my muse that I wrote last night. Guess which choice I'm going for?

"If we're going to pillow-fight, we'd better make it fair," Siana said. She shoved her pillow right to the end of the pillowcase and stood up, holding her 'fighting pillow' up in the most threatening way she could manage.
"Why are we...?" Scott started. Siana hit him across the head with her pillow before he could finish the question.
"Why are we having a pillow fight?" Scott asked, catching the pillow as Siana took another swing.
"Because you were looking crabby and you wouldn't talk," Siana said.
"Crabby?" Scott demanded.
"Yeah, and you've gone all broody and ignory again."
"All what?"
"Never mind. What are you - my editor?"

*coughs awkwardly*

I was going to go for the word-vomit, actually. I thought I might talk about Camp NaNoWriMo, trilogies that refuse to stop at three books...

What do you mean, you would have preferred to read about the pillow-fight?

Yeah, this blog post isn't really going well. It's probably more entertaining than something serious, though, so I guess I'll keep ploughing on and see if I stumble across something interesting. That's a surprisingly effective strategy when WriMo-ing season rolls around, by the way. It also works to let the characters get irritated with the lack of action and go and cause some mayhem. If you're not too attached to a few of your other characters, anyway.

Now, about the trilogy-that-isn't-a-trilogy and Camp NaNoWrimo. They're linked by the fact that the June session of Camp is where I'm going to be writing the fourth book of my ex-trilogy. If you feel so inclined, you can read what I pretend is a synopsis on my Camp novel info page. At some point I'm planning on replacing that with a real synopsis, but the curse of the pantser is that I really don't know a lot about what happens in the story at this point. I have a list of questions that need to be answered during the story and I know some of the characters - okay, one of the characters - but finding out the rest is going to be an adventure.

Right, that should keep my blog not-quite-dead for a couple more days. I was supposed to post at least four times in May, so I'd better get a move on with three more posts.

Who are we writing for, anyway? The second half.

This week's (or whatever week - I know I'm a bit slack with some of these posts) WriYe Blogging Circle topic is all about who we write for. I've answered the first part in a previous post, but this second part is too long to be tacked onto the bottom of that. There are limits to how much I can expect people to read in one hit and it really does look like two different topics.

Anyway... fanfiction, editing, rewriting and why I keep going:

Who are we writing for, anyway?

This week for the WriYe blogging circle we've all been invited to answer the following question: Who Are We Writing For Anyways? My answer is... um... a little wordy... so I'm splitting it into two posts. This post answers the question "Who do we write for? Ourselves or to please others?"

Finishing the first draft

Today I wrote the last words of an almost-230k project. Then I sat back and looked at it for a few minutes and didn't really think about anything much. I just felt tired. No euphoria, no tears, not even a massive sense of loss. This was a project and a character I'd spent over a year with and the only reaction I could come up with after putting a close to his story was a general sense of tiredness.

Why my story titles are a combination of muse-dust and random songlyrics

Titles. I've been told everything from that the story title is incredibly important to that I might as well just name it 'untitled' because the publisher will pick the title anyway. Not that I thought about it much until relatively recently, of course. Until some time in late 2010, I'd only ever named stories after the main female character. It was kind of a tradition - in far too many files to count, there was only one story that actually had a title.