What’s up Wednesday, mid-October version

Hey, everybody, I’m not sure how often I’m going to be participating in What’s Up Wednesday over the next month and a half; probably depends on how many more Nano spotlights I get. But I’m here this time.

What I’m reading:

Finished “Tricked” from the library, loved the ending. Sometime soon I’m going to have to start Iron Druid #5; there was a teaser for “Trapped” at the end of “Tricked” and Granuale is finally finishing her druid studies!

Trying to catch up on Asimov’s magazine stories now, and listening to “Heechee Rendezvous” on my iPhone. Love me some Robinette Broadhead and Heechee alien adventure.

Still rereading one of the incomplete drafts that I’m going to be finishing in November: “A Witch of Arion” has been read, and I’m nearly at the awkward cliffhanger in “The Aurigae Express”

What I’m writing:

Steampunk Roswell 51 has been drafted and it’s out to the Team Ambitious critique group. I haven’t started writing anything else; it was a little draining, so I’m concentrating on reading the stories that I have to critique, tackling a few other items from my October to-do list, and getting ready for Nano.

What inspires me right now:

It’s less than half a month until November! I can feel the creative energy rising already.

What else I’ve been up to:

Still learning what I can do with the Nexus tablet. Spent a lot of time with family over the Thanksgiving long weekend. Organizing all my various book collections, including contacting Brilliance Audio to re-download “The Skies of Pern”, which I’d managed to lose my DRM-authorized copies of along the way. They were very helpful about that.

What about you? Click here to join the hop or check in with some other great writers.

This is what’s up. On a wednesday

Hey, everybody, What’s Up Wednesday time again. I missed last week, because IWSG also falls on Wednesdays, so what can ya do? Ooh, looks like this is my #900th post, cool!

What I’m reading:

I’ve been “Tricked” and I love it! 🙂 I’ve been reading the fourth book in the Iron Druid, (which is named ‘Tricked’ mostly on account of the Trickster god Coyote who takes a prominent role,) on my new Nexus 7 tablet. It took about five minutes from the moment I got the notification that the e-book was available at my library to set up the Overdrive app and download from the library website. Very cool.

I’ve also started rereading the incomplete drafts that I’m going to be finishing in November: “A Witch of Arion” and “The Aurigae Express”

What I’m writing:

Steampunk Roswell 51 is underway. Hopefully I should have the first draft finished by Monday morning so I can send it in to Team Ambitious for critiques. I’ve actually been getting a lot of writing done on the bus this week, and also made good headway over at Williams this past weekend with Elizabeth Twist. I’m looking forward to Nano write-ins already!

What inspires me right now:

Wrimos from around the world, especially the ones who’ve volunteered to be interviewed. All the cool stuff coming up on the Nanowrimo website. And my friends Elizabeth and Rhonda, who are participating in a library reading in Hamilton this weekend!

What else I’ve been up to:

Playing with the Nexus tablet, including plenty of angry birds and watching videos on the bus. Writing a critique for the start of a critters manuscript involving archeologists excavating the WW1 trenches, a cool idea. Drawing and doing some more programming and still reorganizing my music collection. :]

What about you? Click here to join the hop or check in with some other great writers.

Nanowrimo Camper Check-in, week 2

Word count: 17,379

I’m having a lot of fun with ‘A Witch of Arion’ so far. Maybe it should be ‘The Witches of Arion’ since I’ve got two living witches, one dead witch, and one witch wanna-be. But titles can get sorted out later.

My witch wanna-be MC has just been raped by a demon at the behest of the evil witch; not that fun a scene to write. 😦 And then I felt moved to cut away to some of the secondary characters, and introduce the good witch, Summer Rain from the hamlet of White Rock. I’m finding it a bit hard to keep track of the character names, place names, and other consistency details at this pace, but that can be part of the Nano fun!

One little inconsistency hobgoblin just occurred to me today. The man who took my main character (the witch wanna-be, Nashua,) along with the travelling fair introduced himself as The Fox, and all of the other characters in the fair call him that too. I seem to have a habit of choosing Fox-related names for scene-stealing minor characters in Nanos – there was Johnny Fox in the Star Patrol story last November, who I already posted about at length.

I must have had foxes on the brain after Nashua left the fair and moved in with Black Ear the witch – the first morning, she has to wash out in the garden, and is surprised by a ‘red wolf.’ The witch was watching, and tells Nashua that that wasn’t a wolf, just a fox.

Nashua: “What’s a fox?” headsmack!

With a bit of luck, I can get the bit to work, I think. When she was interacting with The Fox at the fair, she never showed any particular sign of knowing what it was a reference to, so as long as she remembers the guy when she’s told that the animal is a fox, it’ll hang together better. The idea I had was that foxes aren’t found in the area where she grows up, near the seaside town.

Wish me luck with the rest of Camp Nanowrimo. Are you working on a writing project this month. How’s it going so far?Jo

A little insecure about Camp Nanowrimo…

So, yeah, I remembered about Insecure Writer’s Support Group at the eleventh hour. 😉

But it’s a fairly good day for it, because I just started the August session of Camp Nanowrimo. I’ve pushed myself to a pretty good day 1 word count – in fact, the scene with my character’s mother and the witch just started flowing so well that I didn’t want to stop in the middle of it, and I’ve got 1897 words now.

But this is really the first time that I’m going to Camp Nanowrimo and not hanging out on the rebel side of Camp. August last year, I said that I was a rebel editor for camp, and I didn’t really end up with much to show for my editing, though I learned a lot about structure from Lani Diane Rich’s Storywonk revision class. In June, I got about 20,000 words done and more than half a dozen stories, so I’m calling that a rebel win.

This time, it’s fifty thousand or bust. I’m excited and yeah, a lot nervous about that.

But onward! The only way out of camp is the finish line. 😉