Making it to the end of Nanowrimo...

Yup, I did it. I wrote 50,208 words during November, but I have to admit that I didn't follow the rules of the game precisely because all those words aren't part of the same story.

I know, you might be thinking that happens all the time in writing. A writer begins a story thinking it's going to go one way and then it ends up going another. That's called the creative process. But that's not what happened here.

What happened was I was happily writing a first draft of one novel until about midway through the month. I had more than 23,000 and was feeling really good about it. Then I received a phone call from my editor saying what would be really great was if I was working on something else altogether.

So, yeah, I stopped working on project number one and quickly started working on project number two. Now I'm about 27,000 words into that. And feeling very good about this project, too.

It's been quite an experience banging out 50,000+ words this month and I'm still a little (a lot) amazed that I was even able to it. I have some more thoughts about it, but they're going to have to wait because I just finished typing my last 3,000 or so words about fifteen minutes ago and I really just need a break :-)


That's still a lot of words, right? So I'm hoping the people at Nanowrimo will forgive my creative license with their

Just when you think you have a plan...

...everything changes.

Well, maybe not everything, but enough to make me step back, switch gears, and start again.

Up until Monday, I had been working on a novel that would've been a pretty major departure from THE BELLY DANCER. But after getting some great feedback from my editor and some soul-searching, I realize that's probably just not the best way to go just yet. So, I'm going back to a story I started working on several months ago and set aside. It's in a similar vein to THE BELLY DANCER, though a little different time and milieu.

And you know what? I'm already feeling so much better about this direction. I'd had reservations about that other idea that I ignored. I'd gotten so far with it, though, I just couldn't let it go.

Now I'm glad I have. I've been working on this new (old?) story for just a couple of days, and already I can feel a big difference in the writing...

I'm a very happy storyteller right now :-)

NaNoWriMo Update

I'm still toiling away on NaNowriMo -- pretty much keeping up with the daily min. to get myself to 50K at the end of the month.

One thing that is frustrating me a bit is that my pages seem more like a freewrite exercise than novel pages. I'm finding myself writing off on tangents about character backstory and I know I'm not going to keep these in, but I feel like I have to write them to get them out of my system (and to better understand the characters) before I can write bona fide novel pages.

So the word count is pretty much there, but the progress? Not so much. My attempt at being a pantser isn't working out as well as I'd hoped, so eventually I'm going to have to sit down and create a better outline than what I have.

Guest post: Terence Hawkins, author of THE RAGE OF ACHILLES

Terence Hawkins’ debut novel, THE RAGE OF ACHILLES, a modern retelling of the THE ILIAD, debuted earlier this month. It "has the paradoxical, invigorating effect of making Homer's epic feel oddly familiar, and of highlighting its deep strangeness at the same time," says Tom Perrotta, author of LITTLE CHILDREN.

Hawkins, an author and trial lawyer, was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Yale. His work has appeared in Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), Keyhole, Pindeldyboz, Ape Culture, Eclectica, Megaera, the Binnacle, and the New Haven Register. It has also appeared on Connecticut Public Radio.

So here’s a harmonic convergence if ever there was one: When I first started practicing law, nearly thirty years ago, in Madison, Wisconsin, my secretary was a belly dancer. No kidding. At lunch she’d go off to deliver bellygrams and come back to type out briefs about pendent party jurisdiction and federal exclusivity. All her friends were belly dancers. I’d go to parties at her house where I’d see the distinctions between the various traditional schools demonstrated. At that time, the fusion styles I see on your page were things of the future. At one such party I even met Art Feldman of NPR’s “Whaddayuh Know.” Neither of us danced. I think.

That said, belly dancing did not inspire THE RAGE OF THE ACHILLES. Nice if it had. Because this is a writer’s site I will tell the real writer’s story of how I came to write the book.

Humiliation.

Yes. Humiliation.

I took my first novel in progress to a writers’ workshop in Manhattan. Confident that it would be met with praise if not outright adulation.

Didn’t work out that way. As I read the chapter I’d brought to the group, I happened to glance up to intercept the embarrassed looks my work seemed to be generating. As I read further my shirt stuck to my back with the effusion of flop sweat, because I suddenly knew, down in my heart, that this book was really, really bad. A conclusion that the group seemed to share in its subsequent discussion. When I got into the cab to go back to Grand Central, New Haven, and shame, I asked the driver whether he knew a bar where I could get morphine.

When I got home I decided that I should quit writing or try something else. Given the schooling I’d got downtown, I clearly wasn’t ready for a novel. At that time I was reading Christopher Logue’s WAR MUSIC, a blank verse account of several books of THE ILIAD. And I’d just seen “Saving Private Ryan.” So I decided to try to write an episode from THE ILIAD with Spielberg realism, as an exercise, to see whether I really had novelist chops.

That exercise was THE BATTLE OF PATROCLUS. I thought it was okay, so I decided to try another episode. And another. Pretty soon I had nearly a hundred pages. So I propped Lombardo’s translation up to one side of the screen and wrote the whole book.

Just like that. Well, okay, maybe not just like that. More like in just two years. But I think what this shows is that old adage, which probably predates Gutenberg, the difference between a published writer and an unpublished is as much persistence as talent. This book was inspired not by an idea, or a vision, but by the need to keep writing.

By the way—I’m going to finish that first book.

You can learn more about Terence Hawkins and his novel at http://www.terencehawkins.net/.

4th day of NaNoWriMo

I have a whole new level of respect for people who accomplish the goal of writing 50,000 words in a month. Yesterday was the first day I even reached the daily minimum of 1,667 words (just a tad over, actually). The first two days? Not even close. So I'm already behind.


But I'm not giving up.


I'm in the middle of an interesting scene, so I think today will be a good writing day. We'll see.


I could make this post longer. Unfortunately the words won't count toward my NaNoWriMo goal, and -- well -- I need to focus if I want to make it through...


If you've signed up to NaNoWriMo, too, and want to look me up, my screen name is "deanna" (I know, not very original, huh?)

Wish me luck :-)