Tag: writing

NaNoWriMo thus far

I must say, my NaNoWriMo has gotten off to a very slow start. As previously mentioned, last week I attended a workshop on Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR for short, but more on that later), followed by a weekend at my dad’s, so in the first couple of days I only managed to squeeze out just shy of 400 words. Sunday and Monday were filled with family drama and I only got round to really writing yesterday. Even then it was slow going and I didn’t even meet my quota for one day.

When I updated my word count before bed last night the site informed me that at my current rate I’ll finish my 50k by 20 March next year. So far today I’ve managed to whittle that down to 4 March. I need to speed things up.

You can help.

Click here to find out how

Happy NaNoWriMo

Today is the official start of National Novel Writing Month. My trauma counselling course ended yesterday and the wife and I are spending the weekend at our in-laws (both her parents and my dad and stepmom live in the same town, yet we met 1500km away and only after my folks had already been living there for three years), so I probably won’t get much writing done. But today I’m sitting next to the pool with the laptop and am planning to make a decent go of it before the wife joins me here this afternoon.

In the meantime, may your NaNoWriMo not be characterised by moments such as this…

Chasing the Muse Continue reading “Happy NaNoWriMo” →

Prophecy

The novel I started writing at the beginning of this year (currently on ice) is a high fantasy with mages, magic swords and creatures that only exist in ancient legends. I’m planning to finish it still, as it’s the story that convinced me to start writing after walking around with it in my head for five years, but I got hopelessly stuck with it about seven thousand words in and I think the best approach for this NaNoWriMo is to start afresh.

In the meantime, here’s a scene I wrote about one of the characters. It wouldn’t have formed part of the novel, but was rather an attempt to get inside one of the character’s heads along with a bit of backstory for the novel itself.

Enjoy.

Prophecy Continue reading “Prophecy” →

If at first you don’t succeed…

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I started on a novel early this year. Unfortunately I got stuck roundabout April, seven thousand words in. By June I had decided to put that novel on ice and start over. No writing has happened since apart from what you can see on this blog. That is about to change. Continue reading “If at first you don’t succeed…” →

On word limits and sticking it to the man

I came across this via The parasite guy‘s blog this morning.

You know how writing contests (and blog fiction challenges for that matter) always have word limits? Well, Scott Bartlett did not like the six-hundred-word limit of a contest he entered, so he wrote a story making fun of the word limit…and won!

Actually the story can work as a pretty good template for what should be in a short story if you really think about it.

Click on the title to read Six-Hundred by Scott Bartlett.

And in case you missed my attempt at romantic comedy in yesterday’s Song Title Challenge, go read Rollin’ With My Homies and tell me what you think.

Have a good one.