Another Grant Faulkner interview! This one is more official than mine.

Following in my footsteps to tell the world more about their new leader, Lindsey Grant, program director for National Novel Writing Month, put up an interview on the Office of Letters and Light blog about the OLL new Executive Director, and Chris Baty’s heir in spirit, Grant Faulkner.

So check it out to learn more about Grant’s book-stacking habits, his beloved mannequin head, and the coolness of 100 word story! And if you haven’t yet, you can read my interview with Grant today too.

Nano Spotlight: Adventure Writes

Good morning! Only 15 hours, seventeen minutes left in November here. Today, I’ve got my last Nanowrimo spotlight – Mel and Adventure Writes.

How and why did you end up participating in National Novel Writing Month?
This is my first year, and I had heard a lot about it from other peoples blogs, and how excited everyone was, but I didn’t really want to do it at first. I didn’t think that I would have enough time to write 50k words. Well Ali Cross posted about how she was planning on doing NaNo even though she just had her book come out. I thought to myself, if Ali can do it, so can I. So I signed up before I chickened out.

What are you writing about this year?
I am a rebel NaNo because I’m writing my story that I’ve been working on for a while, The Daughters of Etheria

What’s your favorite part of Nanowrimo and why?
Probably the writing calender that was posted about how many words to write a day. When you’re told to 1667 words a day to meet a goal, it doesn’t seem so overwhelming.

Who’s the best character in your Nano?
I don’t know if I could choose one of my characters as the best, but I do have a favorite. Jack Frost, is my favorite character of all.

Sneaky Ninja Question! What one thing are you most thankful for?
In life, my family, in the writing world, I’m most thankful for all of the bloggers out there who post things about improving their skill, their writing experiences, and motivating others to become better writers.

The next leader of the Office of Letters and Light!

Like many people who went to the Night of Writing Dangerously in San Francisco last night, I thought that the ‘big news’ was going to be the fact that this was Chris Baty’s last year as the Executive Director of the Office of Letters and Light, the non-profit that runs Nanowrimo, Script Frenzy, and the Young Writer’s Program.

I don’t know about anybody else there, but I was very excited about an announcement that Chris made in the middle of his moving thank-you speech – naming Grant Faulkner, board member of the Office of Letters and Light, as his successor, and thus our new Fearless Leader.

I don’t know much about Grant. I managed to get a moment to congratulate him at the dinner, and even got my picture taken with Grant and Chris Baty. But he seems cool, and like a reasonably good choice to follow in Chris’ footsteps, even if he also reminded me a little of Adam Baldwin, who wouldn’t really be the kind of guy I’d ask to lead me into 30 days of creative craziness.

A very west-coast Six Sentence Sunday

Hello from San Francisco! I’m sure I’ll have lots to tell you about the NOWD tomorrow.

I had a bit of a hard time picking six sentences that I liked for tonight. This is after Brett asks Melissa if she can put him in touch with a particular medic back up on the main ship:

“Nurse Practicioner Lyon is busy trying to save all of our lives from the Kane syndrome, Ensign Walker,” Exec reminded him. “You were there when we heard about this interdisciplinary committee that she is serving on. Surely there are other biology and anatomy specialists on the ship that you could consult with.”

How could he explain to a woman like the Exec that he trusted Natalie, and that they understood each other as colleagues? Then something else occured to him. “Wouldn’t every specialist be working on curing the Hyperspace sickness, in their own way?”

Day 14 Nanowrimo update

So, I’ve been working on my new book for just about two weeks now – and I have to say, it’s going pretty great. Having a lot of fun, discovering more about the Star Patrol universe than I thought I would considering all the years that I’ve lived with Brett Walker and Melissa Dempsey in the back of my head – but there are some things that you just don’t discover until you’re walking the walk.

My current word count is 36,534 at the moment. I’m hoping to get a few hundred more done this evening before I go to bed.

Some of the cool stuff about my book so far:

• The mysterious character of Exec, the second-in-command of the ship, opened up and I found out more about her at the most unexpected times – though maybe I should have expected them. For instance, the Captain gives her a little pep talk on an open comm line about how he thinks that she’s the right woman for this mission – and since he’s her superior, he can speak to her in a familiar fashion, as the ensigns and even lieutenants under her can’t.
• Even though I hardly plotted out any of the high fantasy sequence, it came out pretty well in true Nano fashion – not quite ‘whenever anything gets too boring have somebody burst through the window with a sword in his hand’ but close.
• The stuff after the end of my original outline, though, which is the stuff I’ve been working on since Saturday, though, is possibly the most fun – after we’ve had first contact with the aliens and are trying to figure out the getting-to-know-you stage of human-Breian relations.
• One of the coolest bits of this is that I know all of this weird stuff about Breian history and the Archon’s discipline of knowledge that my human characters don’t, yet – but I’ve also absorbed this intuitive sense of how to play out the secrets that I wouldn’t have had a clue about back in 1998. There’ll be time.
• And I really like the little bits and snatches of Jody Quinton and Gary Peterson’s budding romance… so much so, in fact, that I’m almost wishing that they could be the main characters, instead of Brett and Melissa and all of their angst. Oh well…

How’s your nano going? Have you ever taken an opportunity to go back and work with an idea from many years ago and see how much you’ve learned as a writer since then?

Guest starring Badger as Johnny Fox…

Today’s word count: 22,727! Yay for me.

I’ve been thinking about one of the minor characters in Act Two who’s been very fun to have in my Nano – he’s basically just a figment of the fantasy world that my characters are trapped in. But the coolest bit, is that I mentally cast him as Badger from Firefly – not just Mark Sheppard, but specifically Badger, because Mark’s a really versatile actor, but Johnny is almost exactly what Badger would be if he crossed over to this particular fantasy world – and got a different accent.

Johnny is a trade baron, with convoys and caravans crossing the land, and running the entire show from the tiny village of Connaw, near the northwestern edge of Darkwood forest. There isn’t that much to Connaw, but all of it is under Johnny’s thumb, and he likes that better than being based in a larger town with bona fide nobles and guardsmen and who-knows-what else to deal with.

My main characters come to Connaw in the first place because Fox’s supply wagon is the only way for them to sneak into Breia Manor, deep inside Darkwood, and two of them get cover jobs as caravan security guards. Unfortunately, Johnny becomes suspicious of them for something that was really just an unfortunate co-incidence, and they end up having to deal with him to save their own plan. That’s when we find out that Johnny wants something from Breia Manor too.

Unfortunately, the plot is soon going to be leaving Johnny behind – after one more bargain for information, my main characters will be heading off to the mountains to find three-armed wizards. But it was great to have him around for as long as he was in the story.

Quick Nanowrimo update: Day 8

Feeling back on track again. I realized yesterday that I’d overcounted by about 100 words on Sunday and missed a few weekend milestones that I thought I hit, and then yesterday evening I was tired and didn’t feel like writing much when I got home. This morning I was all excited to write on the bus – and then the bus was 25 minutes late and got really crowded because it was essentially carrying two full loads, so I didn’t have enough elbow room to use the Alphasmart. Ended up just reading the whole way on the palmpilot.

But I crossed the 20k line on the bus ride home, and I’m off to the first unofficial write-in at Chester’s beers of the world. Whoo-hoo!

How’s your November writing journey going so far?

Six Sentence Sunday – Nanowrimo opening

Hello everybody. Word count for Nanowrimo at this point, (Saturday night,) is 13,482, but right now I’m going to rewind back to the very first ones from last Tuesday morning, November the 1st. To be clear, since I’m rebelling, this is a continuation from the Star Patrol blogisodes and not really the opening scene of the book.

They emerged from the shuttle airlock, and Brett looked over at Jody to see how she was doing in the high-oxygen atmosphere of the planet. It actually seemed to perk her up a little bit, though that might just be Jody trying to reassure everybody that she was all right and could get the job done.

Then he noticed the aliens.

They had evidently arrived in some sort of cart drawn by a single three-legged animal, but the cart wasn’t moving anymore and had possibly been ‘parked’ by extending rods down to the ground so that it would remain stable. There were three aliens, and as far as Brett could tell they each had three legs and three arms, with four tentacle-fingers on each hand. He filed this away for whatever insight it might help him build into their way of thinking.

And thanks very much to the admins out at Six Sentence Sunday.

Falling for Nanowrimo, too literally.

Current word count: 8,006. Yay! At this rate, I’ll be finished too soon, on November 18th.

My main character just made the transition from Science Fiction through to a fantasy framework, after the aliens transferred his brainwaves into their crystal.

Unfortunately, I was a little too wrapped up in the story when I got off the B-line bus on my way to the write-in tonight. There was a loose projection in the sidewalk that I tripped over, and actually had a moment where I thought “I tripped. Can I get my balance back? No, I’m goin’ down. Dammit, I can’t help but land on my bag, I hope I don’t break anything expensive.”

I didn’t break anything at all, as far as I can tell, but I skinned my knee, and also the fabric of the dark blue pants I was wearing. Which suggests that sometime during November I should probably squeeze in a couple hours to go shopping for new clothes.

Have you suffered for Nano over the last few days?

Send your Inner Editor on a nice November vacation

Inspired by my incredible Hamilton ML, Gale, I have decided to go on a new tack with Inner Editor control for this year. I’m sending him off for fun in the sun.

After all, I’ve been working him pretty hard for most of the year. We’ve got most of the details sorted out. After finishing a rewrite and a guest blog post for Chris Eboch this evening, Editor is going to be getting up before me tomorrow, and taking the shuttle over to Pearson to catch his flight. He’s booked for the whole month at some reasonably nice resort in the Bahamas. And because I know that he couldn’t really relax and have fun without some sentences to tinker with, he’s packing lots of my writing – past Nanos, screenplays, short stories, even my old fanfic. But if he tries to call me up and tell me ANYTHING about it, I’ll find a way to make him pay dearly.

This is probably not an approach that everybody could take with their Inner Editors. Many are too wily and competitive to simply go away for Nanowrimo, or at least, they might not go for it THIS year. But my IE and I have been through this before, and I think he’s learned that he can’t derail me during November. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m excited about this idea.

I just hope that the Bahamas Nanowrimo group doesn’t try to send him back because he goes and messes with THEIR masterpieces!