Tag Archives: novel

iPhone, Photoraphy

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> Something Wicked This Way Comes

I loved the novel1 of this title, by Ray Bradbury when it first came out.  The movie came out years later and I was unimpressed. I think I’ll read it again.

 

  1.  Something Wicked This Way Comes. Published 1962. The novel combines elements of fantasy and horror, analyzing the conflicting natures of good and evil and how they come into play among the characters in a carnival setting. ↩
NaNoWriMo, Writing

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month

This past November, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO1) for the first time.

Trying to create a novel of 50,000 words in thirty days is quite a task. Unfortunately, I did not succeed in that goal, however I learned a great deal in my effort.

  • I learned, concretely, that procrastination is my foremost difficulty in writing (and probably other areas of my life as well. 😱 )
  • No character or story is written in stone when in the creating process. I was totally surprised at how it forced me to think about the story in a different way when faced with a word-count deadline.
  • Save the editing for later… It can slow you down. A lot.
  • Writing 600 words is easy,… 1,667 words2 is somewhat more difficult.
  • I’m not the only one!

These are the principal ideas I came away with. For the record, I finished on November 30th with 37,228 words. That’s right. Only 12,712 words shy of the goal. Why? Because I procrastinated too many days and toward the end,  I literally got sick. In the bed sick. My illness is not the issue now. It’s January and NANOWRIMO continues to push me with editing what I have written and getting my work read.

Now What?

So I continue working on my story and learn more about where to proceed from here. Meanwhile, that story that was bottled up for so long, seems to have allowed other ideas and stories to bubble to the surface, and now my biggest issue is determining which story gets priority.

I may or may not ever publish anything, but I am really enjoying this entire process.

  1. “National Novel Writing Month, shortened as NaNoWriMo (na-noh-ry-moh), is an annual internet-based creative writing project that takes place every November.  NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel between November 1 and 30. Despite its name, it accepts entries from around the world. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to get people writing, no matter how bad the writing is, through the end of a first draft.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Novel_Writing_Month ↩
  2. This is the average word-count you need to reach per day,  in order to make the 50,000 word deadline by November 30th. ↩