What’s Up Wednesday: The last Nano-mile?

What’s Up Wednesday is the weekly blogfest to share the answers to a few simple questions… Join us!

What I’m reading:

Great stories from Analog magazine; finished “The Matthews Conundrum,” and read some great novelettes and shorts like “The Chorus Line”, “Redskins of the Badlands”, “Ian,  George, and George” and “Bugs.” Started really getting into “Magic Bites” on audiobook, too!

What I’m writing:

Lots of great Nano words! I’ve finished off “The Aurigae Express”, and I’m back to “Alien Love on a Kitchen Scale”, where the plot is finally heating up with some alien courtroom action; our heroes have found out that their right to own property in their town on the Libran planet of Escaleron may be taken away, along with their homes and the buildings they were using for their businesses.

Oh, and my current word count is better than 43 thousand! Hoping to finish at the Friday write-in.

What inspires me right now:

Still write-ins, and occasional flurries of snow. 😉

What else I’ve been up to:

Not too much, really. Still posting plenty of Nano spotlight interviews here on the blog, of course. Backed up my Nano writing to 44 different places this weekend. Bought a universal remote control that doesn’t actually have a code for the device I want to use it with, sigh.

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

What’s Up Wednesday: Tales of a 10k weekend

What’s Up Wednesday is the weekly blogfest to share the answers to a few simple questions… Join us!

What I’m reading:

Some more stuff from the magazines; still in the middle of “The Matthews Conundrum.” Picked up an Isaac Asimov paperback at a library write-in, that had some stories and essays I wasn’t familiar with as well as the old standbys. And I just finished “Heechee Rendezvous” in Audio-book format; loved it!

What I’m writing:

Lots of alien stuff! I reached the 10k mark for “Alien Love on a Kitchen Scale,” which is the minimum point for sample chapters, and switched over to try to finish off “The Aurigae Express.” As I mentioned in the title text, I wrote over 10,000 words this weekend, starting from Friday morning until Sunday evening. Whooh!

What inspires me right now:

My fellow Nano-ers and going to plenty of write-ins; like five write-ins a week! 😀

What else I’ve been up to:

Wiping my iPhone and slowly restoring it from backup, because it kept refusing to sync my audio files. Going back to the show ‘Life Unexpected’ where I left off, and completely surprising myself with the ‘One Tree Hill’ crossover!

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

Camp Victory is anticlimactic

But at least it’s a victory, right? 🙂

I had 534 more words to write when I got up this morning, (for my slacker goal of 10k in July,) and I brought the Alphasmart with me on the bus, hoping to get some more of ‘The Aurigae Express’ written. It went pretty well, got up to the word count just as the bus was entering downtown Burlington, read some of ‘My Man Jeeves’, which is pissing me off because half the stories don’t have Jeeves or Wooster–but that’s a different story.

So, the bus got stuck in a bit of traffic on the beach road this afternoon, but I was happy watching an episode of the ‘90210’ reboot on my iPod. After dinner, spent a while pulling together all of the different word count I’d done in July from nearly a dozen different files, and copied it into the validator on campnanowrimo.org

Yay! It looks like I got just the right amount of padding, because the validator took away about a dozen words and left me with exactly ten thousand. So next, of course, I clicked the goodies button, and…

No winner goodies for another week and a half, not even banner images or a PDF winner’s certificate. Le sigh.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 7

Greetings from Odyssey! Sorry I missed WeWriWa last week, but I’m going back to  my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s made its first Jump. Neither of them are reacting very well to the experience.

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A frightening vision popped into view, curling brown tendrils and two piercing eyes at the bottom of a face. Alan yelped again before realizing that the face was upside down and Diane was peering over the edge of her bunk. The upper levels of his brain resented her for having recovered so well that she felt comfortable moving about.

“We should probably think about going to meet our fellow passengers.”

Alan whimpered again. Fear of strangers was something that he couldn’t even put into words at this point, but he definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable around them yet.

“Okay, okay, no big hurry.” Diane’s upside-down face withdrew, leaving only a few trailing ends of hair to taunt him.

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 6

Good morning! This may be my last Weekend Writing Warriors entry for a while; I’m off to Odyssey today, and not sure if I’m going to keep up with sharing eight sentences a week while I’m there. But for now, I’m still in  my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

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“Are you…” Those were both letters, weren’t they? R and U… what had he been trying to spell–R U N for run? No, he wasn’t in any shape to run anywhere, and it would be impossible in zero gravity anyway.

“That was fucked up.” For a few seconds, Alan was impressed that he’d managed such a coherent thought, and then realized that he hadn’t. He hadn’t moved his lips, or formed that thought before he heard it.

“Dixie?”

“Kick your ass…”

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 5

Good morning! It’s time for the next eight sentences from my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” To briefly set the scene, Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

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His body no longer seemed to be some hideously unfamiliar monstrosity, and the sights and sounds of the chamber were becoming more bearable as he got used to them.

 

“Ummmmmmmmm…” The humming sound that Alan could make was so immediately soothing that he kept it up for a long time before remembering why he had started in a first place. The sound was a word, wasn’t it? Well, not really a word, but a sound that held a meaning like a word in some ways, except that he’d stretched it out for so long that even that sense of it was lost. He forced himself to stop the humming, and some inner child he hadn’t known about made a disappointed sob. “Die…” That wasn’t so pleasant to think about. No, he still didn’t have the right word, the right name. He forced himself to try again.

 

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 4

Good morning! It’s time for the next eight sentences from my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” To briefly set the scene, Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

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The next thing he realized was that he was curled up in a fetal ball. That seemed to be wrong somehow, and after a moment of painful thought he figured out why; the last thing he remembered was being strapped in. How could he have curled up into a ball while the straps held his limbs in place?

The answer to that was obvious. Somehow he must have been desperate enough to retreat from reality that he’d worked the strap releases himself. That was a little hard to reconcile with his memories of being so unfamiliar with his body, but maybe there were layers and layers to how the human nerve system reacted to hyperspace exposure.

His nerve system reacted to the thought of hyperspace with a series of violent spasming shudders, and Alan struggled to strap himself back into the crash couch again before he managed to go flying into a wall.

Aside from that looming memory of something traumatic looming at the edges of his awareness, the worst appeared to be done with. 

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 3

Good morning! It’s time for the next eight sentences from my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” To briefly set the scene, Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

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He felt a mixture of pain, confusion, and some kind of a deep melancholia or depression. All of his limbs appeared to be hooked up the wrong way, and he wasn’t even sure what the proper number of them was. Some kind of vibrations and lights appeared to be assaulting him from particular directions, but for a long time he couldn’t make sense of them. Everything hurt, especially remembering.

Eventually things clicked near enough to the reality that he knew that he could recognize a few things. He remembered that his name was Alan, and that he’d actually lobbied to get into a starship travelling to an alien planet eight and a half light years away using some mode of transportation far beyond everything that the human race understood as being possible under the laws of physics.

For a second he tried to reject that identity. Alan was obviously dangerously insane.

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.