What’s up Wednesday? Crashing from Nanoland back down to Earth

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

What I’m reading:
Finished “Academ’s Fury”, just hours before the ebook expired back to the library ebook. Since then, I’ve started “Sheepfarmer’s Daughter”, one of three Paks paperbacks that my Mom gave me for my birthday, and started listening to stories via the PodCastle and Toasted Cake podcasts again. I kinda fell off fiction podcasts during November, partly because I was listening to my soundtracks so much, and the fabulous Storywonk Nano podcast; something else had to fall out, but I’ve got plenty of stories queued up on the iPhone now!

What I’m writing:
Well, I reached 60k for Nano at Wafflepalooza, and I’m really happy with where my incomplete books got to. Since December started, I haven’t done any actual writing, but I do want to work on synopsis outlines for both books, as well as getting back to the Flash Fiction course.

What works for me:
Riding the wave of Nanowrimo for a victory lap, I guess! Pulled off another 10k between Thursday and Sunday, which is pretty good.

What else I’ve been up to:
Enjoying not going out for write-ins nearly every day. Playing around with my Dana Alphasmart wordcount software a little more, with keyboard shortcuts to copy values from field to field, and changing the deletion routines so I can just delete scratchpad 2 out of 4, instead of having to delete 2, 3, and 4 all at the same time.

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

What’s up Wednesday? That sweet sense of Validation

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

What I’m reading:
Still mostly “Academ’s Fury” in library ebook format, from Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series. I’ve been taking it slow and not reading that much because I’m busy with Nano stuff.

What I’m writing:
I validated my 50k for Nano this evening! Both books are going well, though I’m briefly blocked on “Never Found” and flopping back to the sci-fi for tomorrow.

What works for me:
Writing on my own twitter sprints, hosting a virtual write-in for dozens of internet strangers in a coffee shop, apparently. I got 2k done in about an hour and a half, whoohoo!

What else I’ve been up to:
Went out for burgers with my family at “The Works” in Jackson Square, where I had my first brisket on top of a cheeseburger. (It was kinda like a cross between roast beef and bacon, yum!) Also went to visit my Co-ML ThornesQuest, who’s having some health issues and is in the hospital.

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

What’s up Wednesday? Snow! (Or is that down?)

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

What I’m reading:
Still mostly “Academ’s Fury” in library ebook format, from Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series. I was actually busy and stressed enough a few days this past week that I didn’t read anything much!

What I’m writing:
Nanowrimo word count is up to 38,266. Still working on both the urban fantasy, “Never Found”, and the futuristic Sci-fi, “Hypermappers”.

What works for me:
Going to write-ins is still great for my word count, and my soundtracks are proving fertile ground for inspiration. I actually realized recently that I needed to flip one song to the other soundtrack: Doc Walker’s “Rocket Girl.” With a title like that, maybe I should have known it was science fiction, it really fits for Ariann and Jeff as a couple.

What else I’ve been up to:
Went bowling for the Hamilton Nanowrimo midway party, which was a lot of fun! And today we had a surprising amount of snow for mid-November, with the resulting commute issues, sigh. (I was on public transit today, though I’m not sure if it would have helped to be driving.)

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

What’s Up Wednesday? The Nano-est time of year

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

What I’m reading:
Well, I’ve finished reading “Furies of Calderon”, enjoyed that quite a lot, got the sequel “Academ’s Fury” from the library as an ebook, enjoying it so far. Also finished “Gossip Girl” and enjoying some graphic novels, mostly “Chew” and the last IDW Doctor Who run with Matt Smith’s Doctor.

What I’m writing:
My split Nanowrimo is going quite well so far! I’m almost at twenty-five thousand words just now, and have been flipping back and forth between “Never Found” and “Hypermappers” without any particularly stressful issues.

What works for me:
Flipping back and forth between two novels! I’ve been concentrating a few days at a time on each project, and using my soundtracks as mental cues, so if I decide that I’m finished with Never Found, I stop listening to its soundtrack right away and listen to a little of the Hypermappers soundtrack before I start writing that. I’ll probably ramble about the soundtracks in another blog post soon.

Also, going to write-ins. Amazing source of word count and creative energy. Luckily our region has daily write-ins, and I’ve been able to make them 5 days a week. (The Tuesday and Wednesday write-ins conflict with my day job schedule.)

What else I’ve been up to:
Dealing with a little unexpected car trouble, pitching in with the @Nanowordsprints twitter account, and running around dealing with some ML stuff. (We’re going bowling for our midway party this Sunday, yay!)

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

Error: Out of headspace (or creative memory?)

We’ll return to your regularly unscheduled Nanowrimo spotlight tomorrow, but today I wanted to share a small epiphany about my writing process. As many of my friends and followers may know, I set myself creative goals for each month, and I often like to switch between different books, stories, or other projects I’m working on at the same time. My October Goals list was pretty ambitious, and I’ve been scrambling a little to get ready for Nanowrimo (both in the personal writing sense and as a Hamilton ML,) and also cross as many things off that list as I can.

But Saturday evening, as I was going over the list, and sitting in a Codex chat room, something odd happened. I picked one thing on the list which was a leftover from my September list, finishing the revision outline for “Won’t somebody Think of the Children”, decided that darnit I was going to make some progress on that before I went to bed. So I started to look for the folder where I’d put the outline in progress…

And something inside my brain complained! It wasn’t anything that I could put into words right away, but as I sat there at the laptop, trying to figure out what was wrong, I got a good guess of what the problem was. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on developing plot bunnies for two different novel ideas I’m going to be tackling in November, as well as revising some of my short stories and going through a course on learning how to write good flash fiction. I think that at this point, trying to juggle three different novels, the two I’m going to be writing in about a week and the one that I was planning revisions for in September, is just too much for my brain to be holding and working with in the same timeframe.

I don’t want to force either “Never Found” or “Hypermappers” out of the creative side of my brain and then try to get back up to speed with them in a hurry, so the revision outline for “Children” is officially on hold until December at least. 😉

I’ve never really thought that much about how much story I can work with at a time, or run into the limit in quite this way before, but it makes some sense. In the Iron Druid books, the main character, Atticus, talks about building ‘headspaces’ that he can then use to perform Druidic bindings like taking many people across to another plane of existence at the same time. He builds up the headspaces by learning languages or memorizing great swathes of literature by productive people. His apprentice still has only one or two headspaces at this point in the series, so she’s more limited in what she can do.

So that’s about it. For now, I’m respecting my headspace limit and trying to minimize the creative stuff that I’m doing this week beyond prepping for Nano. Four days, four hours and counting!