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 |  This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
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This will be a blog for my writing, maybe with (too much) personal thrown in. I am hoping it will be a little more interactive, with me answering questions, helping out and whatnot. If it falls this year (2024), then I may stop the whole blogging thing, but that's all a "wait and see" scenario. An index of topics can be found here: "Writing Blog No.2 Index"  Feel free to comment and interact. |
| NaNoWriMo #20 Day 20. Two thirds of the way there. Ten days to go. So, I was on the radio today, and that sort of killed the morning, as I took the opportunity to do some research for a book I am collating and had to go to the post office, and did a little bit of shopping. So this afternoon I set myself and managed to get a good few hours of typing done. Now, I say it killed the morning. But… I wrote a poem. Well, sort of. I re-wrote a poem. I wrote a parody of the C C Moore classic about writing a novel. It was something I could do while I was waiting in the radio station lobby. Took me maybe an hour and a half, but the idea was right there! I love it when a plan comes together! So, of course, with a novel to write, my brain said, “Hey! Here’s a poem!” And I did it. Stupid monkey brain. Anyway, this afternoon and the novel. The story is all set-up at the moment, introducing the characters and establishing the religious basis for a lot of the issues that are to come. Slow build, as is my wont. A bad dream to hint at disaster to come, and hints at what happened 21 years earlier. Not a real lot to report there. More than 5k words in 5 hours of writing, though, so that is a positive. But the biggest thing is – I’ve cracked 100k words! So we are looking at close to what I churned out last year. Apologies to those sponsoring me… Poem words – 407 Novel words – 5466 Total words today – 5873 Total words– 105325 |
| NaNoWriMo #19 Day 19. Cryptid story is finished! Woo-hoo! Just under 4k words to clear it off today, between bouts of helping people in my usual Tuesday library. So, after the tragic death yesterday, I was ready to kill the lazy guy, but he went and saved the two palaeontologists! They killed a few of the animals, but they are still out there. And there is a HFN ending, and the lazy guy lost his marriage, so he didn’t get off scot-free. Alright, and that is what a pantser sometimes has to do. We have to let our characters tell us where the story is going and not force it. As soon as that one character convinced me she had to die, the story just kicked along. Trust your characters – it’s their story and you are just the scribe. At least, that’s how I approach it. What this also means is that I had 6 possible endings I detailed a few posts ago, and not one of them was where the story ended up. It was a weird way to go for me, without that end-goal so clear after halfway through, and yet this story worked and I am happy with a first draft. I was going to leave it there for the day, but the demon story hit me and so I did a quick couple of hours typing there as well. I introduced the two main characters – Joanne, a psychologist, and Anne, a girl she is looking after. And then I introduced the work Joanne is doing. She is helping the victims of a cult… and it turns out that Joanne escaped from a similar cult as a child as well. Joanne is established as being a physically strong woman. Now, unlike the cryptid story, I have the ending of this one. Lots of allusions to the number 5, so after 4 of Joanne’s closest are killed by an entity, she needs to protect the fifth to stop the creature staying in the world, and her physical strength and long hair are going to be a part of that. I have some notes about the ending already. This story could flow easily. Maybe another 50k worder, I think. So… Cryptid words today – 3998 Total words in cryptid story – 50234 Demon words – 1750 Total words today – 5748 Total words– 99452 |
| NaNoWriMo #18 Day 18. Holy crap, what a day! Almost 10k words today… because the characters told me what was going to happen. I killed a couple of characters off… including one who I was sure was going to survive. It has increased the tension inside the hut. And then one of the animals managed to get in through a broken window. The narrator managed to kill it with an extension cord while one of the others hit it with a pick-axe. An off-screen death, a tragic death scene, a commitment to a divorce, a lot of recriminations, emotions everywhere… My brain feels like mush. Hopefully I can finish this one tomorrow, then hit the demon woman story… Sorry, I want to give more detail on how this happened, but it just happened. I started to write and the characters argued, and they went outside, and… it happened. Attack… death… It was what I needed. I was talking myself out of killing some people; I had to let the deaths go ahead. It was what the story needed to have more pathos and more emotion, and to let the reader know the stakes are really that serious. It is exhausting writing so many words in a day. I’m going to bed. Words today – 9118 Total words– 93704 (yes, I have cracked 90k) |
| NaNoWriMo #17 Day 17. Well, I finished the short story this morning. At a little over 2020 words, it is a weird little story about a series of women who, through some sort of means, are forced to “drown” themselves by an ex-partner (who they share). But they do not seem to actually die… I really like the opening scene I wrote (are we allowed to like our own writing?)… Okay, sidenote. I have seen two thoughts on this. First is that to be an artist, you should be proud of your work, as you put it out into the public, and if you hate your work, why do that? The other is that being happy with or proud of what you wrote is braggadocios and almost sinful. But I am trying to write for a living, and so, even though I am nervous about posting things I might sell here, I think it is okay to be a little happy with something you write… especially in my case when I am so unhappy with a lot of what I write, even published works. So, back to the post. I really like the opening scene I wrote, describing an Australian beach at the height of summer. It is just description, but I like to think I captured something of that horrid heat we put up with so often here. Anyway, that story is now done. Yes, ideas just attack me and I feel I have to grab them and write them down… So… the cryptid story. I added almost 2 and a half thousand words there as well. They got the lazy guy in and his wife wants a divorce. Just one long chapter of building character and back-story so that the readers feel for the person I’m going to kill. I think. I still have no ending. I am going to trust the characters to take the story where it needs to go. I think that is the best way to go. We’ll see how we go tomorrow with this! Sidenote #2: Someone keeps saying on one of the forums here that AI can teach people proper grammar and punctuation, when it can’t even get it right. I have decided to stop engaging with this person, despite them hijacking a thread about people wanting to learn rules of grammar. What do people think? Let this person think using AI to write is learning English rules, or try to help? I am inclined to leave them deluded. Word counts! ‘Adrian’s Call’ (short story) – 2020 words Cryptid story – 2431 words Total words today – 4451 words Total words so far – 84586 words |
| NaNoWriMo #16 Day 16. Stuggled a little today. I sort of wrote myself into a corner, I think, so I went back and rewrote to kill off one of the campers and injure another, which gives me an excuse to get everyone into the lightning affected hut. Except the lazy guy, who won’t answer his caravan door. It’s now evident they are being hunted by the creatures, and they have had to put up makeshift coverings in front of the windows. I need to remember that for later and Chekhov’s gun… or Chekhov’s broken window, as the case may be. But I think still not knowhow it is going to actually end is what is stifling the creativity when it goes into coming to the end of the tale. Now, while pantsing is the way I write, this does show an issue with that writing technique. By now, I usually have at least an idea of how the story is going to end. I can see where I am aiming. That means my writing gets direction as it reaches its conclusion. Still dithering about how I am going to end this, I think, is making me struggle with getting as many words down as I know I am capable of. I have my usual Sunday morning video call to Florida tomorrow, so I hope by talking with her about the stories (as we are wont to do), it’ll break it open in my head. Writing about it, emailing about it, is all well and good, but that verbal sparring and back and forth, bouncing of ideas, talking over one another, the immediacy, can really help me get my thoughts into some sort of perspective. The only thing I know for sure is the narrator survives because, well, he’s narrating. And his wife, otherwise it would be a real downer. I mean, there’s going to be enough deaths as it is, but that might be pushing it a little too far. So, yes, pantsing means there is no real prep as such, and you will have to do a rewrite a lot of the time when you’ve finished, but when this whole “no ending” thing hits, then you’re in trouble. I mean, even in the fairy story, once the fairies told me they were good guys and I introduced step-uncle Dan, I knew he was going to be punished in some sort of fairy manner. I might not have had the details, but it was so clear that was where it was headed. I could write in that direction. With no ending showing itself here, that is most likely the reason I am so stuck. However, I did do some words today, and have cracked 80k. 3797 words today Total words: 80135 |
| NaNoWriMo #15 Day 15. Halfway through NaNoWriMo and I am on course to equal last year’s insane effort. So, almost 5k words today. Good day concsidering it felt rather relaxed and chilled – half an hour writing here, half an hour there. Sometimes going in with no expectations and just writing when I felt like it and not forcing the issue can pay off. Of course, so can not having a job, a social life, friends or anything akin to something else to do… but I digress. Anyway, we’re still with the cryptids! They have set up at the dig site and are about to spend the night. This is it – they are going to be attacked. So, how do I isolate them completely? Got the idea from an interview I did maybe 30 years ago when I was still a vaguely working journalist – I interviewed a small group who had been inside a building when it was struck by lightning. I had some good memories of what they told me – I’ve used bits subsequently in stories – but decided to go hunting online for any other eye-witness accounts. I found three, all on different sites, and all of them not only told very similar stories, but they matched that interview from long ago. So, lightning struck the satellite dish on the roof, and burnt out everything plugged into the electrical system, which included all their phones and computers. It also made the electronic gates lock so they cannot leave. Now they are electronically isolated, and are just coping with that. I stopped it there, with them trying to recover physically and mentally. Tomorrow, I will hit the first attacks at the new place. I have 7 characters there… the narrator will survive and so will his wife… but how many more will get out unscathed? I get excited writing about the demise of characters. Unfortunately, I do feel that the characters I am going to kill off are not well developed (except the lazy guy), but I still hope their deaths will make the horror of the tale really be upped and hit the reader hard. The story has cracked 30k words, but I can’t see it being stretched to reach 50k; this means it will be yet another novella. Then again, I could pair it with my other Australian cryptid story and sell them as a good 90k word book, 2 novelas, Australian monsters. I’m getting ahead of myself. This story isn’t even finished yet! 4923 words today Total words: 76338 So, if this is halfway, I am looking at 152676 words, about 1000 less than last year. |
| NaNoWriMo #14 Day 14. Wrote this morning for a while, then again this afternoon. This evening I returned to the hand-written short story I started that died. I won’t count those words until I type them up. Hopefully I’ll finish it this weekend. So… the cryptid story. After the death and attack on one of the diggers, the police don’t want them to leave town so, reluctantly, they are now at the dig site. The fat lazy guy has spent no time in annoying the people running the site. The narrator has now shown the teeth he found at the site of the attacks, and they match teeth found at the dig site. To explain – they are uncovering a thylacoleo fossil, and found teeth imprints on it. They used dental putty to make casts of the teeth… and whatever attacked this creature tens of thousands of years ago is very similar to what is attacking the people now. The problem is – the creature is not on file. This is new, hence being a cryptid. So, I have the survivors together in a very isolated part of the country. I can feel a big showdown coming… and are still not sure how it’s going to end. Narrator and wife sole survivors would be my best bet, with the lazy guy being the last to die, having saved his friend (the narrator) at the last moment, proving he isn’t such a jerk after all. At the moment. The short story? It’s about an entity drawing people out to be drowned. That’s it so far… 3204 words today Total words: 71415 |
| NaNoWriMo #13 Day 13. I had a busy morning involving job searching, getting mail and collecting the latest book one of my short stories has appeared in. (‘New Occupant’ in A Little Fantasy Everywhere from New Jersey Ink, 2024). I had to do some work, and then I sat down to write. An hour later I got a phone call and had written a hundred words, tops. After the phone call, I sat down and hand-wrote the start of a short story which died a horrible death. I started and deleted the next section in the cryptid story a few times. I went back. I found the problem. I needed to get the lazy guy to the dig site so that tings could be tense ans the campsite would be vacant. So I added some words, and then wrote about an uncomfortable dig, then they went out for tea (dinner to USians?) at a local pub (pub and hotel are interchangeable in Australia – don’t get hung up on it) where they are confronted by someone who is rather insistent on knowing what happened there. The story of the death and injuries had, of course, got around. They get back to the campsite and find that guy has beat them there… and is dead. I stopped there because I am not sure what the characters are going to do next. I do know, however, that this new character who I so quickly and crudely killed off is an Internet “journalist”, a cryptid hunter who believes the killers are yowies. He’s wrong, for what it’s worth. What’s a yowie? I hear those from culturally isolated countries ask. It is the Australian version of Bigfoot or the Yeti. It is a transportation of the Bigfoot legend into Australia, attached to only vaguely related (that is, not really) Indigenous legends. Like the Bigfoot and Sasquatch, to be honest. (I’ve been researching creatures and cryptids for coming up 20 years – don’t @ me!) Anyway, that kept me going, and the cryptid tale has finally moved forward with only some rewriting… Now, get this – I wrote down a list of ideas for my demon-woman story. Not a pan, but ideas. Number ‘5’ dominates, I have the past event, I have the way this is going to start. I’m not counting these as words, but it is as close to planning as I get. When cryptids are done (if…) then I can go straight into the next one! 3039 words today Total words: 68211 |
| NaNoWriMo #12 Day 12. Usual Tuesday of helping out where I can with the older members of society, so I had this afternoon and evening to write. Time doing other things was good. The fairy story – called My Sidhe at the moment – is finished! [Cue celebratory music.] 4924 words today, for a grand total of 23587 words. So, the finish. The fairies gave the kid the choice of what was to happen to his step-uncle. None of them involved death, but they are all unpleasant. The kid picks him being turned into a tree inside the fairy world. Then I have an extended ending where we discover the narrator has been chosen as the bridge between worlds. Cute, maybe not entirely great, but it is over, and it is around 7k words shorter than I was thinking it would be. Fantasy, YA… good enough for union work. So… tomorrow… The cryptids had better wake up because I do not want to start a fourth story until the initial three are finished! Short one tonight, but I am really happy about this, ending two works already. So: 4924 words today Total words: 65172 |
| NaNoWriMo #11 Day 11. Had some jobs to do this morning… which took a lot longer than I had hoped they would take… As such, I didn’t get down to writing until just before lunch (had a Remembrance Day thing to go to). Then I wrote, and the fairy story went into a tense section. The step-uncle tried to cut down the tree that was the entrance of the fairy sidhe, the narrator/kid (yes, 1st person PoV) tried to stop him and his chainsaw, and then they were both drawn into the sidhe. Then the kid left, leaving the fairies to decide his fate and went to be with his aunt. 3916 words. Doesn’t seem like much, I know, but it was a lot of writing. I really tried to up the emotion in the tale, to get the kid terrified, and make the step-uncle menacing, while the fairies remain mysterious. However, I had to stop there. Not because I ran out of time, as I had many writing hours left, but because I have no idea how to finish it. What are the fairies going to do to the step-uncle? Will the kid be involved? If so, how? I have a couple of ideas: he escapes the sidhe but has aged and withered; he dies in the sidhe; there can be no death in the sidhe, so he has an eternity of torment; he comes out with his mind gone. I don’t like any of them, not really, to be honest. So… I let my brain have fun and wrote a quick-fire 273 word poem about the “news” on Facebook. I might submit it to the local paper or read it on the radio (got to get it approved; I abuse Musk and Trump in it). It’s a weird little poem, rhyming, AABBCC etc rhyme scheme, 11-13 syllable rhythm, repeated ending refrain with a twist in the last (fourth) stanza… Exactly the sot of poetry modern poets and poetry critics (including here on WdC) hate. So, how do I write a poem like this? I have an idea – in this case that Facebook is rubbish, after a woman in Sydney created a panic by being an absolute numpty – and then I write lines that relate to it, focusing on the rhyme first and foremost. I go through it a couple of times to make sure it makes sense and as few of the rhymes as possible are forced. Next, I go through and add or subtract syllables to give it a more constant rhythm, based on the average length of line I already have. So, in this case, the shortest line was 8 syllables and the longest was 14; turning that into 12 ±1 to give a more constant rhythm. Finally, I go through to make sure that the emphasis and breathing fits and is as consistent as I can get it. I am not a strict iambic pentameter sort of writer – I’m not that good (not good at all, really) – but it does need to sound right when I read it out loud. So, a good 2 hours and 273 words later… I poemed! And, for what it’s worth, the cryptid story seems to have woken up and is stirring in the back of my mind. I have seen the ending, I think, now I have to get there… I’ll finish the fairy story tomorrow and then ignore the demon woman story and hit the cryptid story and let that go without any other story distractions. I have a feeling that while the others were fine working in concert with others, the cryptid story, because of the intensity of the scenes and the deaths, needs to be on its own. I have encountered that before, and am trusting my instincts in this one. Finish the fairy story tomorrow (I hope!) and then rest and the next day (Wednesday) tackle the cryptid tale. The demon woman story can hang around in the background for a while yet. So: 4189 words today Total words: 60248 |
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