Or at least I will, when it’s finished, but you can go ahead and friend it now if you’d like to read the cleaned-up version:
Friend it, link it, help me generate buzz. These three things would be muchly, muchly appreciated.
Month: May 2008 (Page 1 of 2)
I wasted three hours Friday afternoon throwing this together, and most of my lunch hour today cleaning it up. It is by no means expertly done, but I think it captures the spirit of The Hero Factor and its main characters. Not to mention helps solidify them in my head.
The characters, from left: The pooka, Michael Chambers, Taggart and Thea.
(In actuality: Brainiac, Dean (DEEEEEAAAN!!!) Winchester, and Aryn Sun.)
(In reality: James Marsters, Jensen Ackles, and Claudia Black.)
I did manage to fit some actual writing around all this photomanip fantasizing, too. Over the weekend I finished a chapter, and this morning I wrote another one. If work stays slow this afternoon, I might try to get started yet another. I’m guestimating that I’ve got about 10-15 chapters left to go, depending on how epic my climactic battle decides it wants to be.
10,095, to be precise. That is my total Summer Write word count so far. It’s nowhere near what my word count should be, mind, but still, it’s a nice milestone to achieve.
Only 139,905 more words to go….
I wrote the second act of Hero Factor according to what Jane Espenson refers to as the Love Boat method–that is, I wrote all of the scenes for one plot thread, then doubled back to write the scenes for a separate-but-equal plot thread. These two threads eventually merge into one, so at some point their timelines must coincide. I can already tell that this isn’t happening. I forced the first one to cover a certain number of days, because that’s how long I thought the other would cover, but it turns out the characters in the current thread are much more efficient at getting to the point and wrapping things up than I thought they’d be.
I’m not worrying about it now. In the editing stage I’ll worry about how to make them match up properly. But this is something you might want to be aware of if you write out of order like I did. This was a big issue back on that one multi-author fanfic I worked on that one time, trying to figure out exactly when different things were happening in the story. The up side of that was that there were many pairs of eyes who could catch if the moon was full in one scene and waning in the next. Until I get to the beta stage, I only have my own two eyes to catch these things. I guess I’d better become familiar with the notion of a “book bible.”
Oy. It’s exhausting to realize that the real work starts after the first draft is finished.
I’m off now for a much needed three day weekend, in which I’ll do my darnedest to catch up on my word count. I’ll post word count updates on Twitter via text message, and possibly also here via phone post, but otherwise I’m offline until Monday. Have a good weekend, everybody, and happy writing.
Share time! This is mildly spoilery, but I don’t think it’s too revealing of the major plot points.
Just remember, this is very, very rough.
I’m totally procrastinating, but I wanted a more professional looking layout, and I fell in love with this one by . I love the girly swirliness, and the colors coordinate well with the rest of my site. The only thing I don’t love about it is the lack of an external link list and a tags list, and if I can’t figure out how to add them, I might keep looking. But it’s so very pretty, it will be tough to let it go.
This morning I logged into Twitter and was stunned by tweets from CASizemore, a notable member of the fiction podcasting community, saying that he came home to find his wife collapsed and not breathing. A few hours later, he posted again to say that she had passed away.
He’s only 32. I’m not certain what her age was, but it’s a safe bet she was young. Either way, they’re both too young for this.
He’s an aspiring writer with a blue collar job. I’m not sure what she did for a living or what the insurance situation is, but another safe bet is that this will place a pretty huge financial burden on him, on top of all the other terribleness he has to deal with. If you’re inclined to help him out, his friends have set up an account for him at ChipIn, where you can kick a little in via Paypal. There’s no way to make any of this better for him, but at least maybe the noveling community can help to ease this much of his burden.
My thoughts and prayers are with him and his family.
The problem with Alphasmart is that there’s no word count function, and so I’ll write and write and write and think I’ve written thousands of words, and feel really good about myself, and then I’ll plug it in and upload my writings and find out I only wrote three pages. Aggro.
So Saturday I wrote and wrote and wrote, finishing one chapter and starting another, for a grand total 1,080 words. I planned on writing and writing and writing some more on Sunday, but then I woke up that morning to find that my husband’s sore throat, achiness and mild fever apparently got bored with him and decided to move in with me instead. And so yesterday was pretty much spent sleeping and sleeping and sleeping.
Today is more of the same, except I’m at work, with the added benefit of coughing and coughing and coughing. And I will stop verbing in triplicate now.
Today, I’m promising nothing, as getting out of bed and getting dressed was accomplishment a-plenty. I will try to write, though. And maybe later I’ll have something worth posting.
*cough*
This hasn’t been the best week for me for writing. But it hasn’t exactly been the best week for me in terms of emotional wellness, either, so I’m not beating myself up about it. I’ve still made more progress this week than in the preceding month, so that’s something.
My summerwrite word count currently stands at 3,209, which isn’t that great a showing for the first week, but it’s still makeupable. The Hero Factor is now over 60,000 words long, which officially makes it novel-length, and I’m rounding third base and heading into the home stretch. Still, I expect the home stretch to encompass at least another 25,000 words, so I’ll still be at this one for a while.
And because sharing helps motivate me to keep going, here’s another snippet of yesterday’s output.
Michael slept. So did Taggart. Michael slept the sleep of the righteous and wounded. Taggart, the sleep of the drunk. Thea had more patience for the former.