1 year of Kelworth Files

Well, looks like I was so busy with rewrites and starting off the ‘Harry Potter’ review series that I missed a milestone – this blog turned one year old on June 10th. Happy Belated Anniversary to me!

So, to commemorate the occasion, I’ll link back to three of my favorite memories for each month, June 2010 to May 2011.

June

The very beginnings of my blogging journey.

1. My very first (and most popular) Beat Sheet – Serenity!
2. My trip home from Toronto CSTS 2010 and the G20 riots.
3. The prologue debate.

July

1. Who could forget JulNoWriMo?
2. The Polaris convention!
3. Sharing a rejection letter.

August

1. Travelling up to Hunstville.
2. Fan Expo!
3. CritMo on Stringing Words.

September

1. I got awards!
2. Another beat sheet – The Simpsons Movie!
3. How to take criticism.

Nanowrimo Day 25: Thanks list

Of course, as a true Canadian, I celebrated Thanksgiving with my family back in early October with my family, but being in San Francisco on American Thanksgiving, it was hard not to think of some other things and people that I’m thankful for, a lot of them relevant for this blog, so:

– I’m thankful for all the wonderful people at the Office of Letters and Light, who make such incredible events possible for writers all over the world.

– I’m thankful for everybody else who has taken the time to set up or moderate a participatory writing website, including: Stringing Words, Nanowriye, JulNoWriMo, JanNoWriMo, April Fool’s, NaNoEdMo, NaNoFiMo, and many others.

– I’m thankful that I have the financial resources and vacation days to take a trip like this one.

– I’m thankful that I have family, friends, and coworkers who are supportive and encouraging about my crazy writing ambitions.

– I’m thankful for everybody else who has opened up their pocketbook and donated to support NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy going.

– I’m thankful for everybody in San Francisco who has made me welcome at a write-in, which has been just about everybody I’ve met at a San Francisco write-in.

– I’m thankful for all the incredible writers back in Hamilton in the Nanowrimo group – and the Hamilton Writers group at Chesters who’ve given me great feedback on all kinds of excerpts.

– I’m grateful to Ammy from the sfbrowncoats group for offering a ticket to the Dickens fair to a complete stranger.

– I’m grateful to the entire gang at Stringing Words for their encouragement, critiques, support, and sense of mutual accountability.
I’m probably leaving some people out, but I’ll leave it at this for now. Happy holiday, if you’re in America, and Happy Thursday to everybody else.

Quick mini-updates.

Hey, I’m feeling a bit drained – I’m going to driver education classes this weekend and next, so the time crunch seems to be tighter than usual at the moment. So, I’m just going to quickly run through a couple of other things that I’ve touched on recently for today’s post.

Critmo is well into the second week at this point, and I’m a little worried that participation seems to be lagging somewhat. I still have one excerpt to crit, and somebody else who I’m supposed to be critting is several days late posting her excerpt. Guess there’s not much more to do than keep soldiering on for now, and try to figure out some way to muddle through.

I’ve got more feedback swaps than I can keep up with at the moment – I’m trying to work my way through one Nanowrimo manuscript, an interesting alt-historical romance called ‘Duty’, and I’ve got another novel and a script sitting on my hard drive, and another scriptwriter who’s sent me a message saying that they’re interested in a swap, but I’ve put them off saying that I can’t commit to it yet after all. It’s fun stuff, though, when I can fit it into the day.

And some more playing around with ‘I write like…’

All of my JulNoWriMo words came out as: Dan Brown again. Sigh

The sentence ‘I hate Dan Brown’ bounces back without a result, and highlights the note: ‘For reliable results paste at least a few paragraphs (not tweets).’

The Preamble to the US Constitution is written like: H. P. Lovecraft

The first two sentences of the Declaration of Independence are written like: James Fenimore Cooper

The opening paragraph of Tale of two cities – is recognized as being written like Charles Dickens. That’s good, I suppose

Winston Churchill’s ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech could have been written by: James Joyce

The ‘Give me Liberty or Give me death’ speech is written like – William Shakespeare

JulNoWriMo – almost there!

Don’t really have the time or energy to blog more than a quick update post, I’m afraid. Been writing too much of late.

A few quick stats about my JulNoWriMo so far…

Words written in 29 days: 44,584

Chapters completed: 6 and a half

Words left to reach 50k: 5416

Days of writing left: 2

Last sentence, so far: I’ve managed to avoid getting drafted for anything too frantic so far, but you might not be so lucky.

First sentence: So overall, this does sound like a game or sport we have back on Earth, capture the flag – well, at least a little.

And, for the fun of it, I made a wordle out of those 44 and a half thousand words:

Hopefully I’ll have something a bit more original to say than ‘whew’ once JulNo is done!

A quick JulNoWriMo update

Well, it’s pretty much halfway through the month of July, and my JulNoWriMo project is going well – in fact, I just passed the halfway mark of my 50,000 word goal this afternoon on the bus, writing on my little Eeepc – 25,135 words lighting up on my openOffice spreadsheet screen. A beautiful thing.

I’m not going to go too much detail about my JulNo writing, because it’s fan fiction and I don’t want to ramble much about fan fiction in this blog, which is more focused on marketable writing (hopefully.) But I do find writing fandom works to be an incredible boost for my creative batteries when things are going well.

For JulNo, I’m continuing a story I started last year, ‘Children of the Molecule’ – a crossover between Doctor Who and Roswell, with the Doctor taking Rose Tyler to visit Roswell because she wanted to know if there were really any aliens there. She didn’t expect to find teenage aliens in the year 2001.

It’s a fun story to write, and one that I hope I can manage to finish soon, with the power of JulNo behind me. (I was feeling writer’s blocked on it starting around May.)