( Writing stats behind here... )
Other:

Thanks to paragraphs, I have a new target. I will attempt to achieve not a full NaNo of 50000 but a half NaNo of 25000 in November.

It occurred to me, the moment I fixed on this target, that I had regained a sense of purpose. Once I'd abandoned the NaNo attempt, I'd lost all sense of urgency. My progress had become desultory and the enthusiasm had gone. However, a combination of a new, achievable target and a (probably very bad) sex scene, has got the novel is rolling again.

Tomorrow Zanna will start to unravel the mystery of the scrap of embroidered silk and that clue will take her on to the next stage of the novel. I think I might venture to say that it is now unstalled.


novel_in_90 (Zanna and the God-King): new words: 1958

Zanna and the God-King
22634/ 67,500 (34%)

Tags: nanowrimo, writing, writing progress
Current Mood: accomplished

There are Free eBooks available from the Book Depository.

An announcement here in dianawynnejones set me off post haste to find out more details of the new Diana Wynne Jones book, Enchanted Glass which of course entailed looking at the Amazon.co.uk page and, for comparison, the Book Depository site.

And so my eye chanced to fall on their promotion which involves giving away eBooks. As it happens, I had intended to go and have a look on Project Gutenburg for an electronic copy of Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, but a quick search revealed that it was indeed available as a PDF from the Book Depository. I will now experiment with reading on the Eee because if it works, it will allow access to lots of books that I just don't have room for in physical form.

If you're wondering why on earth I want to read an author who is now best known for writing what is sometimes considered the worst opening sentence ever, it's because there was a BBC Radio 4 programme about him and I was persuaded that there was far more to him than, "It was a dark and stormy night..." and that the story was worth persisting with beyond that opening sentence.

Did you know, for instance, that if it hadn't been for Bulwer-Lytton, British Columbia would now be an American state? He also wrote some early examples of what are now very popular genres, including SF.

Anyway, I don't know whether the Book Depository eBooks contain things that aren't already available elsewhere, but I just thought I'd draw your attention to them.

Current Mood: cheerful

( Writing stats behind here... )

Words that Word doesn't know:
Tea:

novel_in_90 (Zanna and the God-King): new words: 773

Zanna and the God-King
20,446/ 67,500 (30%)

I was feeling a bit stuck. The chasing around had come to an end and the story needs to become deeper and more complex. I have therefore typed up all the hand written notes and added them to the story file. Now I can start to expand on the brief story outline.

Tags: novel in 90, writing progress
Current Mood: accomplished

( Writing stats behind here... )

Words that Word doesn't know: jongleur

novel_in_90 (Zanna and the God-King): 911 new words:

Zanna and the God-King
19,673/ 50,000 (29%)

I'm starting to settle back into the slightly slower novel_in_90 pace. Of course having tried for the past few weeks to push for more, 750 seems relatively easy, whereas when I did novel_in_90 before, it was rather more than the daily word count I always used to set myself, which was 400-500. These things are relative, it seems. I found the same with the photography. The first year I did the photo a week group, it seemed a strain to remember to come up with a picture every week, but after 3 months of doing a photo a day, one a week is a breeze.

Of course writing at this speed, I know that what I end up with won't be a novel, it will be a nearly novel length outline, but I think that writing fast will give it the sort of pace I want for a fantasy thriller.

Oh, and I did work out the other day how it will end. What I thought was the middle is in fact the climax. Making the end work will be challenging but interesting. :)

Current Mood: accomplished

( Writing stats behind here... )

Words that Word doesn't know: n/a

novel_in_90 (Zanna and the God-King): 565 new words:

Zanna and the God-King
18,762/ 50,000 (28%)

As I said a couple of days ago, I've abandoned my NaNoWriMo attempt and have reined back my efforts to a more reasonable level. Instead of trying for 2000+ words daily, I will aim for a steady 750 words per day, which is the novel_in_90 target.

I caught up on the activities for the advanced creative writing class and produced 250 words for that. In the afternoon, I went out for a walk, despite the weather and this evening I managed a desultory 565 words on the novel.

Now I'm writing more slowly, I will actually have time to plan in a bit more detail, but my head is also full of other stuff, such as how to adapt a short story as a radio play and what to write for the tutorial activity. But it's all good practice and writing continues to be enjoyable, which is what really matters.

Current Mood: accomplished

To: Clerk of the Weather

From: heleninwales

Date: 24-Nov-09

Re: Recent deliveries of weather

---

When I signed up for your regular weather deliveries, I was assured that I would be provided with a good variety of whatever type of weather was currently in season. However, for the past two weeks we have had nothing but driving rain, high winds and overcast skies. This is like someone who supplies veg boxes giving the customer nothing but potatoes for week after week. It is not good enough!

If it weren't for the fact that you are a monopoly, I would even now be switching in order to receive my weather supply from another provider.

Yours, disgruntled

heleninwales

Current Mood: grumpy

In case you don't read matociquala's LJ regularly, I thought I'd draw your attention to the fact that she has a post up on Storytellers Unplugged about writing sex scenes.

Straightforward and to the point. A useful reminder that the key word in sex scene is "scene" not "sex". :)

Current Mood: busy

( Writing stats behind here... )

Words that Word doesn't know: n/a

NaNoWriMo (Zanna and the God-King): 2016 new words:

Zanna and the God-King
18,197/ 50,000 (36%)


It looks as though I was right all along. I cannot keep up NaNoWriMo word counts every day. When I do settle to write, if I drop all attempts to write well, I can churn out 2000+ words with no problem. But there are days when my head is too full of important stuff and I'm unable to settle to write at all.

I missed 6 days straight last week while I was preparing and delivering the final lessons for the A-level creative writing sessions and I needed yesterday just to chill out and catch up with other things.

Anyway, the current plan is to carry on as fast as possible to get a complete draft of this story. It's likely to run to over 50K words, even in sketchy first draft, so I'm not sure how long that will take. According to my spreadsheet, if I continue at my present speed, I should complete the 50K by 22 December. However, I might do it faster than that because the A-level teaching has now ended and I only have to cope with normal work levels. Perhaps I should set myself the target of finishing this first draft by the end of 2009?

The really interesting part of this experiment will be seeing if I can turn this draft into something presentable. A lot of world building needs be done before that can happen though. I mean Saint Jacobus lobster festival? And a character called "Igor" as a placeholder? The world building my brain does on the fly leaves a lot to be desired!

LOL!

Current Mood: I told you so

Yes, I'm doing the British thing of talking about the weather, but it has been exceptionally bad for the last two days. I took these photos yesterday, but due to the archiving and hard disk clearing, I couldn't process them until this morning.



This was taken at about 10.00 am, but the water didn't subside all day. Today the flood has drained away, but the sky is dark and overcast and the wind is howling outside and the trees are tossing about wildly. Part of me just wants to curl up under the duvet and go to sleep until it all clears up again. (I'm going to try a second dose of lightbox after lunch, I think, to see if that helps.)

The photo was taken standing on the lower terrace of our garden. Fortunately the garden slopes steeply, to the house is well out of any danger of flooding.

( More photos of gloomy floods here... )

Current Mood: dreary

It must be the awful wet and dreary weather, but I don't feel as if I got anything useful done either yesterday or today. Yet yesterday I taught the A-level English creative writing class in the morning and in the afternoon I caught up with the OU Advanced Creative writing course work. I typed up the little scene in which two characters have a conversation in order to demonstrate that I can write different accents. The scene was duly posted to my online tutorial group for comment. No comments yet, but I also caught up on critting the scenes the others had posted.

Today I skipped the Welsh class, not actually because of the foul weather, though driving through water strewn roads and high winds wouldn't have been fun, but because I was going to prepare the final A-level class for Friday. However, perhaps because I hadn't slept well last night (not sure why), I didn't settle to the lesson prep and felt a bit scattered and unfocused. (Though I did find an audio clip of the opening of a radio play to use in class.) Instead, I decided that I would set up the external hard drive I bought a few weeks ago and still hadn't got around to using.

A few months ago now, I was trying to do a panorama, joining about 3 photos together in PhotoShop Element, when the computer informed me that the hard disk was full.

Aaaaarrrrgh!

I managed to delete enough stuff to rescue the situation at the time, but I realised that I needed to clear some space.

So today I cleaned my desk, connected up the external hard drive and then spent the rest of the day copying files to the new drive and making backups on DVD. All very useful, but slow and tedious and nothing really to show for it.

No further progress on the NaNo story either and I'm unlikely to make any until the weekend. :(

Anyway, I hope the computer will now run a bit better. I'd noticed that the fan seemed to be running at top speed all the time and I wondered if the fact that the computer only had a little sliver of hard disk to work with was causing it to work too hard. It now 33 GB to play with again, which I hope will make it happier.

Current Mood: fidgety