Last day before NaNoWriMo

I feel your panic, marmalade cat.

...and I'm kind of terrified. Am I ready? No. Is anybody ever really ready? I vowed to Be Prepared like a good little scout, but I'm way behind. Today's goal is to sketch out fifteen more scenes. I banged out fifteen yesterday, and that will give me thirty scenes/chapters which is a good place to start. They will no doubt be shuffled, re-worked, and some of them scrapped and/or replaced before it's all over, but at least I'll have a framework to start hanging words on.

Still kind of scared.

Tenting with panthers

...and I just realized we missed Elanor's birthday on the second! I'm a terrible mom!!!! Yeah, she's "just" a cat, but that's still lame. She's my youngest and will be my baby for a long time. Happy second birthday, Spook! May the coming year bring you many more (safe) adventures.

Pre-writing: backstory

Pre-writing and all that it entails is actually a lot of fun, for me, anyway. To learn more about pre-writing in general, check out a couple of great podcasts from the Writing Excuses team. I love doing research and am one of those people who can take an hour to look up something in a dictionary because of distractions that lead down rabbit trails. The internet is even worse: global rabbit trails!

The guest post today over at Kristen Lamb's Blog is all about creating backstory as part of your pre-writing. Piper Bayard gives us license, nay, orders, to backstory the heck out of not just the main characters in our writing but pretty much everybody who walks across the stage and has a line. I can see this as a series of great warm-up sessions, but it's also just a really great way to get your characters and world fully realized. If anybody struggles with plotting like I do, this kind of world-building is going to help a LOT, because the more you know about the people and places of your creation the more naturally events and decisions are going to flow from your fertile imagination.

At any rate, it's another way to play "God", and writers are nothing if not control freaks.

National Novel Writing Month is nigh

Recent events in my life have reminded me that if you don't do get moving and try to do those things that you really want to do ASAP, then you may get to the end of your life never having done anything. With that in mind, I'm going to jump off the deep end and charge into National Novel Writing Month, colloquially known as NaNoWriMo, in a few weeks. It's a personal challenge to write at least 50,000 words in the month of November: basically, get a book written. It's do-able, I just have to DO IT.

I took a stab at it back in 2006 but was derailed when the Spouse's computer died and I loaned him mine to keep him functional. I think I was about 18,000 words in when that happened. I probably still could have done it, but between writing challenges and other life stuff that November, I was pretty much doomed.

This year the decks are more clear, I have more than one machine to write on, and I'm kicking around an idea for what I think could be a fun, lightweight romance novel. I am "outlining" and casting it even now. Stay tuned...