Category Archives: Novels

Productive Day on the Writing Front

Well, it’s been an excellent day. I finally got to the scene I’ve been aiming for and have it changed. Now working on the follow-up scenes. I didn’t record my word count when I started this morning but when I quit the other night I had 85732 words in the first 21 chapters. I now have a whopping 87413! And when you figure I’ve taken out words, paragraphs and and stuff, that’s not too bad at all. A net gain of 1681 words. I’m feeling rather good about myself and my progress right now.

I need to take a break, get dressed and head off to the supermarket. yippee… I’d rather stay here and write but if the weekly shop doesn’t get done, the natives will get restless. It’s bad enough that the alarm dog looks at me like a pork chop by times.

Besides, I have to get up and walk around. The cushion in the rocking chair isn’t overly thick and my wee arse is feeling numb. And there’s nothing worse than a case of numb bum! LOL!!!

Scene transitions

I’ve still not made it to the scene I was planning on working on the last couple of days, but I am in that portion of my novel, so I guess that’s a start. I’ve been told that some of my scene breaks are somewhat abrupt and that a few lines of narration can move me from one to the next.

So as I work my way to the “infamous” scene, making corrections and smoothing transitions as I go along, I’m still achieving my goal of writing every day.

Yeah me!

Another Escaping Idea

I had a brilliant idea for a very tender scene between my hero and the young girl in the asylum. Unfortunately, between the time it came to me when I was in the loo and when I got back to my document and found where that scene was… it disappeared. The fact that there was a disruption here at the house, didn’t help.

I’m hoping that when things quiet down the idea will come back. I have another idea for later on so maybe I best get it roughed out so it doesn’t disappear, too.

GAWD! I hate it when that happens!

Writing Date Results

This afternoon couldn’t have worked out better! It turned out so well, we’re planning on getting together again next month. Okay, we visited, we wrote, visited some more, watched the traffic coming to a standstill on the motorway outside the mall window and wrote some more.

Our local group comes up with a 250 word prompt for each monthly meeting. The other two gals worked on theirs while I worked on a scene in my novel.

None of us knew how the afternoon would turn out but in the end, all three of us were extremely pleased with the results.

Here we are at the food court.

Writing Date

Looking forward to Sunday afternoon when my laptop and I will be meeting two other gals for a few hours for a “writing” date. Never done this before. Don’t know what to expect. Might spend the entire time chewing the fat and brainstorming and in the end get very little writing done… still, if it gets the ideas percolating it won’t be a wasted afternoon.

My Writing Resolutions(?) for 2011

I’m not sure if I would refer to them as resolutions but I have an idea what I want to accomplish this year as far as my writing goes.

1. Learn as much as possible about the craft so I can perfect and sell my novel(s). To that end, I’m registered for a number of workshops and seminars this year beginning later this month.

2. Finish the current draft of my YA manuscript and send it out to publishers.

3. Write every day… whether it’s revisions, new material or even on my blog, get words onto “paper”. This one will be the most difficult since I work full time but it’s not an impossible goal.

Not resolutions as such but goals sounds better. More achieveable, not as daunting and if things don’t go according to plan, I won’t feel so much a failure for not sticking to them.

The disappearing scene additions…

I’m absolutely certain I added to a scene in the earlier chapters of my novel but when I went back to read that particular segment over, the additions weren’t there. So I thought I’d opened the wrong version of the file. Whenever I work on it for a while, I save it as a new file and include the current date in the filename. So I checked a couple of other earlier versions and what I was looking for wasn’t there either. Then I thought, well maybe it wasn’t in the scene I thought it was so I took all my smaller files (3 chapters in length) and combined them into one, saved the new file with a new name and today’s date then did a search on one of the characters who was in that particular scene.

I think the gremlins have been afoot because it wasn’t anywhere to be found yet I distinctly remember writing it. I don’t get it…

I know we writers sometimes hear voices in our heads, was that all this was or did I really do it and have managed to delete it? I know when I type on my laptop, I can sometimes end up doing some pretty bizarre things when I accidentally hit the onboard mouse.

Either that or one of my noctural inspirations was so realistic, I truly believed I’d written it. I just know the original scene was extremely short and I needed to add to it.

Productivity drying up

Since Monday, I’ve not done a lot of “new” writing.  I fixed a transition in the piece I worked on last week. Contemplated fleshing another area out some more but have decided I’ll leave it for now.

And while I was in “fixing” mode, I went back and rounded up the plot bunnies that threatened to run amok because of a change I made later on in the book. Might as well get it done while I was thinking about it.

Productive few days

The inspiration was there, the mind was cooperative and quite a few words were committed to “paper”. I had a few things I had to look up online to confirm with what I’d written. Think I’ve got that all looked after, so… now can fill in the blanks in my documents and carry on.

Did pretty good on the shopping front, too.